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The Denatured Novel

BOOKS BY ALBERT VAN NOSTRAND

LITERARY CRITICISM IN AMERICA (ed.)

THE CONSCIOUS VOICE (ed. with C. H. Watts)

THE

DENATURED NOVEL

by

Albert Van Nostrand

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY. INC.

A SUBSIDIARY OF HOWARD W. BAMS CO.. INC.

Publishers INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK

Portions of this book have appeared in: American Quarterly (Summer,
1956), and The English Journal (January, 1959, and February, 1959) .
Passages quoted herein from I Wanted to Write, by Kenneth Roberts,
copyright 1949 by Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, are re-
printed by permission of Doubleday & Co., Inc.; from From Main
Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, selected by Harrison
Smith, copyright, 1952, by Melville H. Cane and Pincus Berner, execu-
tors of the estate of Sinclair Lewis, are used by permission of Harcourt,
Brace & Co., Inc.; from North of Grand Central, by John P. Marquand,
by permission of the publisher, Little, Brown & Co.; from Past All Dis-
honor, by James M. Cain, by permission of the publisher, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc.; from Hollywood: The Dream Factory, by Hortense Pow-
dermaker, by permission of the author.

COPYRGHT 1956, 1959, 1960, BY ALBERT D. VAN NOSTRAND
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 60-12626

For
NANCY WILLARD VAN NOSTRAND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

./m. GRANT from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
made this book possible. With this grant, during a sabbatical leave
from teaching, I was able to devote my time and energies for an entire
year to the systematic development of an idea. For this I thank the
Trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation, and its Secretary General,
Henry Allen Moe.

The idea of the denatured novel encompasses both literary theory
and economic cause, and my research has had to be broad as well as
intense. To this end, many persons have shared with me their knowl-
edge, their opinions often their disagreements and their specula-
tions. I particularly remember the help of Joseph Barnes, Knox Burger,
William Charvat, Alan Collins, Saxe Commins, Paul S. Eriksson,
Hugh MacNair Kahler, Freeman Lewis, William Miller, Charles Nei-
der, John M. Pickering and Victor Weybright Through various stages
of manuscript, the idea of the book became more precise as a result of
the demanding responses of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., Peter H. Davison,
Henry Klinger, Louise Lawrence, Robert Rieman, Judith Rothschild
and Aaron Sussman.

During six years of research and writing I have also, necessarily, been
a student, and I have been blessed with wise teachers. I owe a great
debt to Howard Mumford Jones, a teacher who understands the whole
endeavor of publishing, and to Monroe Stearns, an editor who is first
a teacher.

My thanks are not intended to assign responsibility for the judg-
ments in this book. The judgments are mine. But all of these persons
have helped me to evaluate a significant subject for the community to
share which is the aim of scholarship; and for their help I am grateful.

ALBERT VAN NOSTRAND
Brown University

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I ART AND ARTIFACT 13

II How TO DENATURE A NOVEL 29

III THE CLAY FEET OF POLK & FRANKLIN 48

IV SLICK NIRVANA 81

V HOLLYWOOD PAY-OFF io5

VI INSTANT FICTION 133

VII AFTER MARQU AND, THE DELUGE 156

VIII ARMS AND THE MANNER 178

IX JUST DESERTS . 202

INDEX 217

The Denatured Novel

Chapter I

Art and Artifact

BEFORE the history of the American novel began, fiction was already a
commercial product in the Colonies. The novel was a form of enter-
tainment already fortified with theories of art when it was imported
into the Colonies in the eighteenth century, and it became domesti-
cated in the new republic because a great many persons who were will-
ing to buy its entertainment also wanted a certain record of themselves
and a certain assurance of their possibilities. Accommodating the en-
tertainment to the practical need for this self-assurance quickly became
a business matter. Since popular tastes were crystallized before profes-
sional writing was possible in this nation, the American domestication
of the novel necessarily involved the abrasions of art and commodity.

There never was any doubt about the commercial patronage of the
new literature, but there were plenty of misgivings. The Reverend
Samuel Miller summed these up, in 1803, in A Brief Retrospect of the
Eighteenth Century, concluding his two-volume survey on a note of
alarm. "Booksellers have become the great patrons of literature/ 1 he
warned. The "SPIRIT OF TRADE" prevailed and authors now wrote
"in accommodation to the publictaste, however depraved, with a view
to the most advantageous sale." These were the auspices of the Ameri-
can novel.

But, in a legal sense, the domestication of fiction did not occur until
1891, when Congress finally passed the first International Copyright
Act, which forced American publishers to pay foreign authors for the
privilege and profit of reprinting and selling their books in the

1 4 The Denatured Novel

United States. Tardy and in many ways inadequate though it was, the
Copyright Act was the best compromise that a few publishers, trade
journalists and legislators could achieve after a half-century of lobbying.

The purpose of the Congress had been to protect American book
manufacturers. So far as the legislators were concerned, literature was
something of a by-product. But the new Copyright Act inevitably had
literary consequences. By prohibiting piracy, the law made it equitable
for the first time for American authors to be paid for their efforts. Since
piracy had involved the reprinting of British novels, the law effectively
decreed a domestic market for American novels.

The new market for fiction after 1891 inherited the old contradic-
tion. The venerable literary form still had to satisfy the fashions in en-
tertainment, which meant gratifying certain popular beliefs, but this
old contradiction of manufacturing art took on a new economic ur-
gency. An expanding market for literature brought rising costs, so in
order to sell what they manufactured, publishers engaged vigorously in
promotion.

The merchandising of literature was both the symptom and the re-
sult of the changes which occurred in publishing during the 1890*5,
and made the industry substantially what it is today. These economic
changes, which resulted in the new fashion of marketing, were efforts
to solve the industry's compelling problem of over-production. Sud-
denly, publishers had a staggering quantity of books, with no assurance
of their getting to their prospective purchasers.

Back in 1804, the year after Samuel Miller had concluded his back-
ward glance, A Catalogue of All the Books Printed in the United States
listed a total of 1,338 titles. But in 1901, ten years after the Copyright
Act, there were more than 150,000 titles in print in the United States,
to which publishers were adding about 8,000 new titles a year. But the
industry had no system of distribution which could keep pace with this
volume. What the Reverend Miller had called the "unprecedented
multiplication of books," nearly a century before, had by now gone
beyond even the publishers.

By 1891, publishers had abandoned the practice of auctions, by
which they had always sold their wares to the trade, in favor of a net-
price system of wholesaling and retailing. But they soon discovered

Art and Artifact 15

that they still had no control over the price of a book or the promotion
of it to a putative customer. After John Wanamaker's department store
had proved how successfully books could be sold as sidelines to other
consumer products, dry-goods outlets, bazaars, and even drug stores
followed suit, with the result that the industry's trade paper, Publishers
Weekly, expressed dismay over the indignity of this "bazaar spirit" in
the book trade, and feared for its effects on literature.

Books suffered far worse than indignity by this kind of selling. The
easiest way for the retailer to make money was to stock only a few titles
and to sell them in volume, a practice that concentrated the consumer's
attention on only a fraction of the titles publishers had made available.
It penalized the great majority of books, and aggravated the problem of
over-production.

With this sort of merchandising the department stores could under-
sell the bookstores which had to maintain more expensive inventories.
No reprisal was possible. When the American Publishers' Association
obtained court injunctions against the R. H. Macy Co., in 1901, and
began a long war of attrition, Macy filed suit for damages against this
monopoly, and won. The Supreme Court decision of this case, ^1914,
protected that practice of bookselling which denied an outlet to most
of the books published.

Ironically the entire trade's active promotion of books during the
iSgo's accomplished only the same limiting emphasis. Publishers began
to advertise their books, and circulate review copies to magazines and
newspapers, in hopes of gathering opinions which they could publicize;
new journals carried the advertising and supplied the publicity. The
most influential of these were the Bookman, founded in 1895, and the
weekly Book Supplement of The New York Times, which appeared a
year later; but these could select only a few of the titles for special at-
tention and merely listed the others.

A cataloging system of one of these journals, in fact, soon became
the booktrade's favorite and most limiting promotional device: the
best-seller list. At the back of its first issue Bookman listed retailers'
reports of the six books currently leading in sales in sixteen selected
cities; and in November 1897 the same magazine compiled the first
national survey of "Best Selling Books." To all intents the trade en^

1 6 The Denatured Novel

dorsed this summary bookkeeping in 1911, when Publishers' Weekly
printed its first annual "Best Selling Consensus." And this channeling
encouraged the folly of best-sellerism.

What Publishers' Weekly called the "bazaar spirit" affected the en-
tire book trade. Subsequently the sales value of literary property in
the cataloging, retailing and advertising of books was systematically
exploited to form public opinion. Best-sellerism affected even the edi-
torial part of publishing. The domestication of literature by the Inter-
national Copyright Act had enabled the book trade to publish Ameri-
can novels, but what the trade promoted was not an art form but an
artifact.

Meanwhile, domestication of another sort in the preferences of
American readers and book buyers had already developed. Popular
opinion favored English novels of adventure and sentimentality. The
first novel published in the Colonies was Benjamin Franklin's reprint
of Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, in 1744; and
English novels were imported in considerable quantity even during and
after the Revolution. British literary opinion fashioned some of the
taste for the novels of Richardson and Laurence Sterne (then Scott,
and later Dickens, Bulwer and Thackeray). But the word was really,
and literally, spread by American booksellers who enterprisingly re-
printed every novel they could possibly steal from the British pub-
lishers.

American writers complained that the demand for this fiction
stunted native literary development. James Fenimore Cooper's two-
volume description of his homeland for European readers, Notions of
the Americans (1828), contains only a few paragraphs about American
writing, and these begin dismally: "As respects American authorship,
there is not much to be said." Cooper's book only emphasizes the dis-
crepancy between America's literary dependence and its political in-
dependence, for which the author blamed the absence of international
copyright and the piracy of the American booksellers.

Cooper's contemporary, John Neal, also complained about the copy-
right situation, but he went further: ". . . if we would write for noth-
ing," Neal interrupted his novel, Randolph (1823) to say, "and give
the copyright of a novel, for instance^ to a publisher, it would still be a

Art and Artifact 17

perilous adventure to him." He was sure no literary form wielded so
much influence on society as the novel, but novel writing in America
had been relinquished by men of genius and given over to women
and children.

The taste of American book readers, Neal charged, was dictated by
British book reviewers. He mocked the public which had waited twenty
years to read the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, "till he had under-
gone an apotheosis at London." Poe and William Gilmore Simms and
a dozen other writers lamented this same sad state of affairs, but to no
effect. Until the middle of the nineteenth century novels which ex-
ploited the inherited taste for English romances were what American
publishers wanted.

Virtually every historical account of early American fiction begins
with an inventory of the curses and benedictions over the novel, of its
evils and its virtues. Fiction was suspect so long as the Neo-Classical
fashion of distinguishing between entertainment and instruction held
sway, as well as the Puritan fashion of deploring this sort of entertain-
ment. But the moralists might as well have been talking to themselves;
the booksellers kept right on grinding out their sentimental and
wicked novels.

Profit and pietism, in fact, kept each other's company. The nine-
teenth-century magazines contained the same wicked fiction their edi-
torials denounced. The advertisements of booksellers protested that
novels were not their primary stock in trade, but they could scarcely
stock enough of them to meet the demand. Even in the novels them-
selves sentimental heroines were forbidden to read novels. All told,
the reader could wallow in fiction's pleasurable vices and save his face
at the same time.

The charges against fiction usually specify its wickedness (novels
were blatant lies ) and its wastefulness. To the charge of lying, the titles
of the novels themselves replied. Two of the earliest of these notorious
fictions spoke for dozens of others: Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Tem-
ple; A Tale of Truth ( 1791; 1794), and Hannah Foster's The Coquette:
a Novel Founded on Fact (1797). A shrewder shot at a wider target
was Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa, an American
Tale Founded on Fact (1811).

1 8 The Denatured Novel

And the novels carried other armament. A rebuttal to the charge of
fiction's immorality usually appeared in a preface, sometimes called an
"Advertisement" or a "Foreword," an "Introduction," "A Note to the
Reader," "From the Author to the Reader," "Introductory Epistle" or
"A Word in Advance." Occasionally a novel would protest its inno-
cence in several of these at once, in which the author would deny that
fiction was delinquent, and would suggest that the novel could better
teach by departing from fact.

But the author did not come right out and say it. Rather, he implied
it in so many words. When Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaced The Mar-
ble Fawn (1860) by saying that "the author proposed to himself
merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral," he sum-
marized far more than his own preface to The House of The Seven
Gables ( 1851 ) . No fewer than twenty-one of James Fenimore Cooper's
prefaces make the same backhanded gesture, implying that inventive-
ness has something to do with the didactic ideal. The tone of Cooper's
"Forward" to The Crater (1848) sounds as though he had been invited
to say it: "Whatever may be thought of the authenticity of its inci-
dents, we hope this book will not be found to be totally without a
moral."

James K. Paulding's prefaces were bolder, just as his novels them-
selves were more fantastic. In Westward Ho! (1832) he asserts: "The
great aim of the author has been to combine an important moral, with
the interest of a series of incidents ... as he knows or imagines exist, or
have existed." But no matter what kind of novel the reader had in
front of him, he was bound to feel at home in the preface. Edward
Bellamy apologized for Looking Backward ( 1 886 ) , saying, "The author
sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book, by casting it in
the form of a romantic narrative." These fainthearted prefaces bear
some vague relation to the classical concept on which so many Ren-
aissance and Neo-Classical poets had defended their art the concept
of virtue as the union of the beautiful and the good but the classical
"virtue" came out merely as wholesome amusement.

American novelists were far more willing to refute the charge that
fiction was a waste of time, for here they were sure of themselves.
Novels were useful, no doubt about it. They were educational and hu-

Art and Artifact 19

manitarian, and hence of practical value. The preface to Charles Brock-
den Brown's Wieland (1798) points out that the novel instructs, by
illustrating "some important branches of the moral constitution of
man"; and Brown appeals the merits of his quasi-science to "physicians
and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perver-
sions of the human mind."

Brown's preface to Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) declares his wish to
instruct his readers in the medical and political aspects of the historic
Philadelphia plague, and also to encourage an active interest in social
conditions and, therefore, a sympathy for the less fortunate. What
could be more practical? Historical novelists were even more comfort-
able with this sort of claim. After all, they taught history, and could
alert their readers to the mistakes of the past.

The humanitarian responsibility was so clear that even the lack of a
"cause" could not stay it. When that arch-journeyman Timothy Shay
Arthur was caught without a specific reform in mind, he nevertheless
knew his place, and explained that Steps Towards Heaven (1858), a
book of lay sermons, taught "no special theology. ... It has no aim but
to assist men to grow better, and thence happier."

These self-conscious prefaces excuse their novels in a manner sug-
gesting that the authors had some civic duty to perform. By and large,
they conveyed what was already taken for granted, and as the nine-
teenth century wore on the numbers of novels containing prefaces de-
clined from five out of every six or seven, to one out of every four or
five. The preface to the American novel had virtually ceased before
Henry James put it to the use of poetics.

There is a reasonable suspicion that these messages were not always
heartfelt. John Neal's preface'to Logan, a Family History (1822) be-
gins, "I hate prefaces." In any case, by the time Edward Eggleston
wrote, in his preface to The End of the World (1872), that "Prefaces
are most unnecessary and useless prependages, since nobody reads
them," the trend was apparent. The popular novel had outgrown the
need for the precaution of sanctifying what readers wanted anyway.

After the iSgo's the apologetic preface got a face-lifting. When pub-
lishers began to use dust jackets to protect books, they discovered that
the jackets themselves could carry a message to the readers. The text

20 The Denatured Novel

on the inside flap of the paper cover, in fact, was more efficient than
the preface. Unsigned, because it was written at the publisher's direc-
tion, it could sanctify the novel without any taint of false modesty on
the part of the author. It could speak with authority as it lied about
how the book would improve the reader and about the fun he was
going to have in the process. But the dust jacket blurb came later.

Meanwhile, the monotone of the prefaces echoed some remarkable
similarities among the novels themselves. The resemblance of these
novels to one another is explained by the fact that a commercially suc-
cessful book creates a market for others like it. Just as simple as that!
Every publisher follows the leader, even if the leader turns out to.be a
book on his own list. Nineteenth-century publishers did not labor to
point out this fact; the general feeling was that they belonged to a
"profession" whose dignity was paramount. If a publisher had to make
money he was expected at least not to talk about it.

But decorum began to change during the iSgo's, and "legitimate
profit" became an acceptable subject. In his 1938 Bowker Lecture on
publishing, Frederick Crofts regarded this tendency to follow the
leader as an obvious public fact. Publishers are always trying to repro-
duce the appeal of previously successful books. "An innovation in for-
mat, in unusual locale, or an original approach or presentation which
results in a best seller is promptly duplicated." This is so, he said, be-
cause "a publishing house is not an eleemosynary institution, and is en-
titled to profit from any definite indication of the public's immediate
interest."

In America during the early years of the nineteenth century, the
commercial success of native novels depended on their prominently
duplicating their English predecessors. John Neal spoke out on this
matter too, in his preface to The Down-Easters (1833). "To judge by
our novel-writers," he said, "we have cottages and skylarks in our coun-
try; pheasants and nightingales, first families, a youth of a 'gentle blood'
and a virtuous peasantry; moss-grown churches, curfews and ivy-man-
tled towers"; and, he added, hardhearted fathers, runaway lovers and
cruel stepmothers: "anything and everything, in short which goes to
the ground-work of a third-rate English or Scotch novel."

Art and Artifact 21

Poe elaborately classified this imitative substance in a book review
he wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger, in May, 1835. He em-
phasized the "succession of dynasties reigning over the regions of ro-
mance," each characterized by a popular author (the Radcliffe dynasty,
the Edgeworth dynasty, and the Scott dynasty) and "each like the
family of the Caesars, passing from good to bad, and from bad to worse,
until each has run out." When Poe wrote this, Sir Walter Scott was
the novelist who had most influenced American readers.

Scott's novels established a demand for comparable fiction which
would celebrate the beginnings of the new nation. In this connection
the novels of Cooper, Kennedy, Simms, Daniel Pierce Thompson and
James K. Paulding were presented. But Scott's adoring public also
supported his imitators without discriminating between the original
and the gross copies. The American booksales of the British mannerist,
G. P. R. James, for instance, exceeded even Scott's. His five-dozen
novels, more or less, flooded American bookstores in the i86o's.

James, of course, wrote more than Scott. But the trick was in writ-
ing more like Scott than Scott wrote, and just such a mannerism ex-
plains how the preferences of most American book buyers are satisfied.
The pathology of this literary cancer was conducted by one of the
ablest of American critics, E. P. Whipple, in North American Review
(April 1844), who made it clear that James was no "maker" in the old
significance of that term. He was a literary mechanic working up the
same raw material into the same shapes. Whipple had a wealth of meta-
phors to show the poverty of James' fiction. "For the last ten years, he
has been repeating his own repetitions, and echoing his own echoes.
His first novel was a shot that went through the target, and he has ever
since been assiduously firing through the hole." James could accom-
plish this precision only by forsaking the individuality of his characters,
and presenting idealized heroes and heroines and unmitigated villains,
"walking essays on character."

James followed the plot around, "catechism in hand," delivering a
homily wherever needed, Whipple said; and his novels showed it.
"Characters should be exhibited, not didactically, but dramatically.
We demand human beings not embodied antitheses, or personified

2 2 The Denatured Novel

qualities, thoughts or passions.' 7 Fundamentally, therefore, the imita-
tion was not at all like the original. "In truth, no two writers have less
in common, in the essentials of their art, than Scott and James."

Whipple continued his surgery of James's fiction by asking how
James could succeed. What did James sell that his customers wanted?
He sold the image of a world where good will finally triumph, but only
after its feverish, exciting enslavement to evil. "The world to which we
are introduced is not a free, common world, where there are chances in
favor both of vice and virtue; but a fenced park, full of man-traps and
spring-guns. A sort of iron necessity conducts everything. We do not
feel ourselves safe until we come to the conclusion. A sort of feverish,
unhealthy excitement is the feeling we experience as we read." To-
gether, the happy ending and the premeditated jeopardy denied the
possibility of real characters, but the characters were not important,
except for the assurance of their ultimate goal. The real attractions
were the "man-traps" and the "spring-guns."

James's novels reconstructed the materials of Scott's novels, but
James put a greater emphasis on the jeopardy of the hero and heroine
and designed a more explicit attention to their travails. By this calcu-
lated exaggeration his novels were his own, not Scott's. They happened
to be like Scott's, only more so. His was an old trick the mannerist
borrows some prominent characteristics of a predecessor and reinvolves
them in a new scheme in such a way as to exaggerate them. But be-
cause it is a new scheme, the exaggerated characteristics have no
necessity. And this distortion, many times repeated by many authors,
explains the process of popular literature.

What the publishing industry has accomplished is a greater effi-
ciency in this eclecticism. The result of its efforts is always a cluster of
new books, reflecting the heat of one that has already made good, like
a constellation around the sun. The warm qualities of popular fiction
radiate from elements that never change. Always the novels that have
made good with American readers have in some way involved the
family scene, the jeopardy of the toiling heroine, and the strain of re-
ligiosity. The combination of these elements is what Frank Luther
Mott, in his Golden Multitudes (1947), has called the Home-And-
Jesus formula.

Art and Artifact 2 3

This formula had a great deal to do with the unprecedented sale of
novels in the 1850*5. It began when George Palmer Putnam's mother
told him to publish Susan Warner's novel, The Wide, Wide World
(1850), a story about the moral travails of an orphan which was so
notoriously successful that publishers lovingly cultivated all the matri-
archal novels they could find, and sold hundreds of thousands of the
books of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth; of Maria Cummins and Mary
}. Holmes; of Marion Harland, Ann Stephens and Marion Mclntosh.

There was no coincidence about the gender of all these authors, nor
in the genetic similarity of their books a fact which Hawthorne noted
as he railed about the whole situation. "America is now wholly given
over to a d d mob of scribbling women, and I shall have no chance
of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash and
should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed." Hawthorne wrote this
in a letter to his publisher, William Ticknor, in 1855, while his own
books languished on booksellers' shelves. "What is the mystery of these
innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither
better nor worse?" he wanted to know, adding: "worse they could not
be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000."

Hawthorne could have discovered from any one of these books the
mystery of the others. They dramatized the difficulties which beset
love, marriage and home; they were about the consequence of tempta-
tion, with plenty of temptation. They all affirmed that human nature
is intuitively good, that loyalty and courage will win out, that a girl
can improve herself in society, and that truth will rise again in the
happy home. In a chapter entitled "Home Influence" of The Popular
Book (1950), James Hart suggests the lineage of these novels by de-
scribing some of their other characteristics, or what Frederick Crofts
would have called certain prominent duplications: "From Bulwer
came the drawing-room scene, purified and Americanized; from
Dickens, the pathetic bride, the orphaned child and the kindly ec-
centric character; from Charlotte Bronte, a watered version of the Jane
Eyre-Rochester relation; from Mrs. Gaskell, the sens of quiet rural
life."

But the real stamina of these novels lay in the religion of Good
Works which they avowed. Humanitarianism, truly a domesticated

24 The Denatured Novel

virtue in this nation, marks another, later cluster of pious novels which
appeared after the publication of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Els-
mere (1888). This pastiche recounts a tale of a young minister who
braces up his flagging religious dogma by entering into social work in
urban slums. It was promptly pirated in the United States, and vigor-
ously reviewed in the press and in the pulpit; and the author estimated
the American sales at a half-million copies six months after the first
American reprint.

The newly organized American branch of the Salvation Army gave
a timely appeal to this version of the problem of what Jesus would do if
He were here, and the booktrade had a marketable subject. In A Singu-
lar Life (1894) Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote about a man who
left the Church to live as Jesus had, and to do Good Works. Edward
Everett Hale's If Jesus Came to Boston (1895) debated the merits of
humanitarianism with William T. Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago
(1894). But the novel which reached by far the most people was
Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896) which abridged all the doubts
and preoccupations of Robert Elsmere in favor of a program for admin-
istrating humanitarian reform. The simple, practical program of a
whole church full of Sheldon's characters was irresistible. After its
serialization in a religious weekly, In His Steps appeared in book
form. Then, after a defect in its copyright was discovered in 1899, the
book was reprinted by many presses which sold millions of copies.

There was no doubt about the appeal of Sheldon's book, because
there was no doubt in it. By expanding one man's humanitarian desire
into a public-works program, Sheldon managed to enlarge upon
Robert Elsmere about as far as possible. Subsequent derivations of
Mrs. Ward's novel exploited some of its other characteristics. For
instance, the athletic vigor with which the hero performs his newly
discovered social obligations became a specialty of Harold Bell
Wright's novels.

These clustered novels all served the practical purpose of ethical,
humanitarian education. They catechized the doctrine of Salvation-
by- Works, a religious heresy in Europe, but turned by the American
Puritans into orthodoxy. Within two generations of their arrival in
the New World, they had domesticated Calvinism, taming the terri-

Art and Artifact 25

fying doctrine of predestination with a theology based upon a contract
between man and God. Thereafter, they made sure, man's behavior
in this world would count.

The legalistic Puritans had found plenty of precedent, for the Bible
is full of covenants to prove their case. But as this Covenant Theology
became popularized during the eighteenth century, it spread beyond
the Puritan churches. As more and more people practiced the old
heresy, Good Works became synonymous with Salvation. All by him-
self, it seemed, man could avoid the fires of Hell.

This simplistic belief inspired countless social reforms always in
the name of Christianity during the nineteenth century. Ultimately,
in the name of Jesus and In His Steps, it even replaced Christianity.
And there were other ironies in this fire. From the beginning, the
American domestication had made Calvinism comfortably secular.
It was no trouble at all, as Benjamin Franklin proved, to merge the
problem of Salvation with the achievement of success in mundane
matters. What a coincidence that the author of Poor Richard? s Al-
manac, that compendium of piety and profit, also took up the cause
of Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded! The attainment of Salvation through
material success is the particular pursuit of happiness that Americans
have always been anxious to read about.

Books that gratify this gross inspiration are known in the publish-
ing industry as "Blue-Sky" books, and they succeed commercially
whenever the authors themselves believe in it. The knack in commer-
cial publishing, of course, is to exploit and to establish if need be
the coincidence of a writer's personal beliefs with the reigning public
attitude. And if the publisher believes in it too, so much the better.
His belief will affect the promotion of the book and probably its con-
tents.

The profit in practical religion, by a publisher who believed in it,
was superbly demonstrated by the publishing house of Thomas
Young Crowell. Beginning in the iSyo's for nearly forty years the Cro-
well lists were studded with inspirational books with clusters of titles
which prominently duplicated one another. T. Irving Croweirs biog-
raphy of his father, Thomas Young Crowell (1926), explains how
some of these clusters happened,

26 The Denatured Novel

The elder publisher fashioned at least five successful books from
the personal vision he shared with Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton. In the
fall of 1874 when Crowell read Mrs. Bol ton's magazine article, "Poor
Boys Who Became Famous," he invited her to write a book to go with
this tide, and she composed short biographies of twenty-eight famous
men. "She skillfully traced the secret of their success, and pointed out
that without work and will no great things can be achieved." Signs of
the enormous sales of this book showed up on the publisher's later
lists, which included Lives of Girls Who Became Famous, Famous
American Authors, Famous American Statesmen, and Famous Men of
Science all written by Mrs. Bolton.

Then Crowell received an unsolicited manuscript entitled "What Is
Worth While," and the booklet he published from this manuscript
soon grew into the ' What Is Worth While" series, written by a half-
dozen authors. One of these, Dr. Orison S. Marden, repeated himself
for several publishers with Pushing to the Front, or Success under
Difficulties ( 1894) , Architects of Fate ( 1895 ) and The Secret Achieve-
ment (1898).

Here is precedent for the contemporary breeding of those happy-
solemn tracts which imitate Dale Carnegie and the Reverend Norman
Vincent Peale. But there is more to this evidence. Crowell had no
interest in novels, or as his biography puts it, "in ephemeral books" or
in "belles lettres." "He preferred solid books and was chiefly interested
in those that would inspire or be useful for reference, so that one
editor was led to say that he 'never issued a book that one is not better
for having read/ " The condescension to "belles lettres" and the
scores of all books that were not practical had, of course, forced writers
to construct all those prefaces to nineteenth-century novels. The sus-
picion still lingered.

CroweH's attitude was no exception. Little, Brown's anniversary
volunre, One Hundred Years of Publishing: 1837-1937, gravely quotes
the policy of the first partners of that house: "Their publications in
general literature have been, for the most part, of a grave, solid and
substantial character, such as works in theology, history, politics, politi-
cal economy and biography"; but they had no wish to print novels or to

Art and Artifact 27

meddle "with those lighter and more ephemeral publications that
come with the leaves of spring and go with the leaves of autumn."

Little, Brown repealed this prohibition after 1890, and such was the
profit in pietism that when the firm published Henry Sienkiewicz's
Quo Vadis?, in 1897, it launched the biggest and most intensive pro-
motional campaign for a novel that Publishers' Weekly could re-
member. In that same year a PW editorial made one of that journal's
most memorable understatements about publishing when it remarked:
"We fear it is becoming a trade." After Little, Brown's Quo Vadis?
campaign, intensive publicity became a familiar device in bookselling.
By 1920, when D. Appleton announced to the trade that it was now
sponsoring the novels of Harold Bell Wright, it had to shout to be
heard over the general promotion.

The "Bazaar Spirit," the competitive promotion of literature, is
the most recent stage in the American domestication of the novel,
causing a sense of compromise, an astonished awareness of something
lost by the process of commercializing. In one form or another for the
past seventy years, the editorials in Publishers' Weekly have repeatedly
asked the question "Is Bookselling Dead?" And for every one of these
editorials the Readers Guide to more general magazines lists dozens
of articles which ask the same question about the novel. These articles
assess fiction in terms of "cultural values" gained or lost and gen-
erally weigh so much air.

There is a certain significance in the repeated doom-calling by
which these commentators announce their subject: "Will the Novel
Disappear?" (North American Review, September 1902); "Is the
Novel Being Superseded?" (Current Literature, September 1906);
"Does the Present-Day Fiction Make for Immorality?" '(Current
Literature, April 1907); "Is Present-Day Fiction Quite Ephemeral?"
(Lippincott's Magazine, March 1909); "The Passing of the Novel,"
(Independent, December 22, 1910); "Are the American Novelists
Deteriorating?" (Ladies 9 Home Journal, September 1911).

It was no passing problem, for apparently the plight persists: "The
Break-up of the Novel," (Yale Review, January 1923); "The Fate of
the Novel," (Living Age, December 12, 1925); "Are Novels Worth

28 The Denatured Novel

Reading?" (Nation, February 13, 1935); and "Is the Novel Done For?''
(Harper, December 1942 ). Judging from these funerations, "The
Slump in American Writing" (American Mercury, February 1940)
has been continuous. Although most of these essayists think the novel
will survive (even the few who hope it won't), they are all worrying
over it. More than that, they share an attitude about the novel which
makes this whole argument monumentally irrelevant.

These essayists characteristically assume the novel's responsibility
to "cultural values," which is what all those nineteenth-century pref-
aces assumed. The "immorality of the modern novel" to borrow a
frequent phrase from these articles seems always to be eroding the
national mind. This, of course, is always presented as an urgent matter,
even though the novel's degeneracy was apparently a foregone conclu-
sion 150 years ago.

In this long, morose debate both the attack and the rebuttal have
assumed that fiction is some sort of public utility. Certainly, this na-
tion has domesticated the novel by making just such excuses for it, by
pondering its usefulness to individual deportment or collective reform.
And the question of whether the novel (like any other public utility)
should also serve "commercial interests" has intensified the debate.

But the novel has always been popular, which is to say commercial,
because it can always illustrate profusely the drama of moral choice
and consequence. The legacy of moralism for the past two centuries in
America has pretty thoroughly obscured the nature of fiction. It has
obscured the reflexive property of the novel form which really is moral,
Fiction is a special way of knowing. It records the human individual as
no other expression can. What happens to it is indeed urgent.

Whatever has happened or will happen to the novel, after all, is
mainly relevant to the form itself. What fiction does derives from
what fiction is. Whether the novel has succumbed to commercialism
as, of course, it almost always has ought at least to be assessed in
terms of fiction's intrinsic qualities: on the grounds of why it is, and
how it is, instead of merely its alleged obligation to public service.

Chapter II

How to Denature a Novel

THE public excuse for the novel is that it is useful. As long as it ap-
pears to teach something practical it is perfectly all right for one to
indulge in its entertainment, but the real reason for the novel's popu-
larity is its gratification of the deep human desire to merge oneself with
the world. The novel finds the terms of the merger. For some reason,
however, this profound personal need has never been publicly convinc-
ing in America. It is easier to get away with the polite excuse.

The justification of the novel had already been made in the
eighteenth century, by the time Americans began to import this
product from England. The works of Aphra Behn and Defoe, of Field-
ing and Richardson and Smollett, and the responses of British re-
viewers to these works, had already fashioned the theory of the novel
as a form of instructive entertainment. It had a purpose, after all.
But in America it was emphatically necessary to spell out this pur-
pose, to rationalize entertainment on the grounds of practicality. The
alternatives were clear from the beginning: A novel either served some
ethical or educational purpose, or it was wasteful. The prefaces to the
nineteenth-century novels undertook this face-saving task, but they
were only symptoms of the assurance the novels themselves were ex-
pected to provide.

This either/or reasoning had been long established by the time
publishers began promoting books in the iSgo's. If a novel wasn't
"serious" it was "popular" or worse, "commercial." Although "pop-
ular" and "commercial" meant roughly the same, the American

30 The Denatured Novel

prejudice that a novel must serve something outside itself has made
"commercial" a more comfortably derogatory term. Book promotion
has merely gone along with these concepts, in that publishers have
accepted the American contradiction of the inherited theory that en-
tertainment can be intrinsically instructive.

The novelists themselves had separated entertainment and instruc-
tion, using the one to disguise the other, and this divided purpose had
existed for a long while. James Fenimore Cooper, the first American to
make a profession of writing novels, had devised a simple expedient, in
his Leather Stocking Tales, which apparently suited everybody: a
chapter for the reader, then a chapter for Cooper. The violent action
would move the characters around for awhile, then they would all sit
down and have a serious talk.

Cooper was not the only one with a divided purpose. Neal and
Simms, even Charles Brockden Brown, were all trying to adapt an in-
herited form of entertainment to their own sober celebrations of the
new American republic and the possibilities it held for the individual.
As often as not, they disguised their philosophical indulgences within
stories which had nothing to do with their opinions, using the form in
spite of itself, as Melville later did in Pierre (1852), and as Hawthorne
tried to do in The Scarlet Letter (1850) with his disarming essay
about the Customs House. By the end of the century, with the notable
exception of William Dean Howells, the authors who wrote about
fiction had firmly polarized the concepts of "serious" and "commercial"
literature.

Frank Norris repeatedly distinguished between literary fiction and
popular fiction. Literary fiction he equated with art, which he called
"serious" and "honest"; popular fiction he called "copyism," and said it
was written by timid businessmen. He insisted that art and commodity
excluded one another. Hamlin Garland thought the same. The dis-
tinction between "serious" and "commercial" literature, in fact, con-
tinues unchanged from the commentaries of Garland and Norris
through Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James T. Farrell
and John Marquand. Just as the earlier nineteenth-century apologists
had found "serious" fiction ethically useful, so these later novelists
have pronounced "popular" fiction to be merely a commercial device.

How to Denature a Novel 31

The trouble is that each of these terms alleges several things at once
about the intention of authors and the tastes of readers, but the terms
do not really distinguish anything about the fiction iself. One fact is
certain: a "serious" novel is not a "commercial" novel which did not
sell very well. The novel form is popular and always has been, and
novels that are published are necessarily commercial. Therefore, the
term "serious" has some special distinction, but most people have
never been able to agree on what this distinction is.

As for distinguishing between the tastes of readers, the terms "seri-
ous" and "popular" cause more confusion than they settle, particularly
when they are assigned on the basis of book sales. Sales records in book
publishing are notoriously individual, inaccurate and incomplete. The
book trade never has had a record of book sales which matches books
published. This is just a statistician's dream. Only recently, in fact,
could the book trade match these two unknowns by subject category.

Most publishing houses have always been privately owned and not
required to make their book sales public. Even if they were required
to (and even if they had the information ), it would now take a mechan-
ical brain to order the confusion of "limited," "trade," and reprint edi-
tions. A publisher will announce a book's sales only to his own ad-
vantage. Even then his public affidavit is a merchandising tool inten-
tionally approximate, the better to impress you. "Seven Big Printings
in Just Three Months!" the ad will say; "Now in its Fortieth Thou-
sand"; "Destined to be One of the Top Best Sellers." The fact that it
is "destined to be" should make you pause.

When an editor can say of a book, "It was quite a best seller,"
clearly the term is tired. "Best seller," in fact, has been so misused
since the Bookman first coined it sixty-five years ago that it more often
expresses a hope than a fact. Since retailers often list slow stock as
"best selling" in order to move it off their shelves, the term is a poor
gauge of popularity.

In common usage "popular fiction" condescends, implying that the
public somehow makes a book worse by buying it in quantity. This con-
descension belittles the best-selling novels of Harold Bell Wright,
Gene Stratton Porter, or Mickey Spillane. But what about the best-
selling novels of Harold Frederic, Thornton Wilder, Sinclair Lewis or

32 The Denatured Novel

Ernest Hemingway? In the same way the term "serious fiction" usually
confuses the work itself with its author's reputation.

Take War and Peace, for instance, which everybody agrees is a
"serious" novel. If you want to say this in a "literary" way, no one will
argue. Its world is abundant. It carelessly piles up incidents so as to
dramatize the whole sweep of history, yet it offers an extraordinary
sense of pertinent detail. During a dozen years in a nation's life it con-
siders the significant circumstances of a society falling apart and the
significant problem of discovering whether an individual can afford
merely to survive. No one would disagree with these claims for War
and Peace. But it happens they are all borrowed from reviews of Gone
with the Wind, a "popular" novel if there ever was one.

Nobody could ever guess the vast difference between these novels
by reading book reviews. Many generations have decided that War and
Peace is one of the great novels of all time, while Gone with the Wind
has already passed into limbo twenty-five years after its publication.
This simple fact of public response is a timely reminder of the loose
language of most book reviews. No one even mentions Gone with the
Wind any more, except everybody in the book trade. This is another
part of the problem. The way books are defined in the book trade has
nothing to do with their literary qualities. The literary scholar and the
bookman talk shop together about as ineffectively as a botanist and a
florist discussing flowers.

Communication between the two is difficult at best, but some im-
portant concepts require the language of both the scholar and the
bookman. The denatured novel, for example. In order for anyone to
talk about the denatured novel it is first necessary for him to be clear
about the novel and its nature. But in what language? The bookman's
terms, like the scholar's, are often not intended for public communi-
cation.

Like every other business the book trade has its "inside" words.
There is no public equivalent, for instance, for the noun "one-shot."
A "one-shot" is a book that is marketed sometimes even written
to exploit a timely interest. The promotion of the book, therefore, will
be based on the decision to print a large first edition. A one-shot is
journalistic; it depends on news value and opportunism. If two of a

How to Denature a Novel 33

man's plays were to make a huge profit on Broadway and cause a lot
of talk about him shortly after he had died, as in the case of Eugene
O'Neill, you might expect a lot of one-shots about him.

If this celebrity were not a playwright but a general or an athlete or a
politician, the shot would be louder. But this is a relatively precise term.
I once heard a salesman refer to a meretricious novel as "a piece of
pork"; an editor at another house called it "sheer hamburger." It is
somehow symptomatic of the scholar's semantic problem that in Pub-
lishers' Row "pork" and "hamburger" are the same.

The trade has no official vocabulary. It has had instead, since the
1890'$, a public parlance and a great many private ones. An editor uses
one vocabulary when he talks to an author about a book and quite an-
other when he presents that book to his sales department. They are
two versions of the public vocabulary the marketese with which he
sells his books. This is a language of classifications which implies merit
without having to specify any reasons for the merit.

The terms "serious" and "popular" belong to the trade's public par-
lance, but they denote no formulas. Nor do they suggest any judg-
ment of performance. If they have turned up favorably in book re-
views, the publisher will always pass them along in his ads, but to him
"serious" and "popular" are merely classifications of a market. In book-
selling they are accessories after the artifact. Their familiarity makes
them useful in describing both the novel and its denaturing. Anyway,
since commercial publishing is responsible for denaturing the novel,
its own marketing terms might better describe the process.

The book trade's functional view of fiction is that fiction is merchan-
dise. Another functional view, which the book trade inherited and has
had to accommodate, is that fiction must be practical; in America this
means that fiction must contain useful information and serve the
cause of ethics. For different reasons, therefore, the book trade and the
American public have sold the novel short. They always try to de-
nature it.

But the novel, being fiction, need not live down to this condescen-
sion. On the contrary, no mere functional view of fiction can take it all
in. Fiction is more than utilitarian. We do not use fiction, we need it.
It is everyone's continuing preoccupation. Being small and fallible,

34 The Denatured Novel

every human being compensates with fiction, inventing a world that
will acknowledge him according to his own desires. He spends his life
keeping that world in repair.

Fiction is the fashioning of an occasion appropriate to one's deepest
need, which is to justify oneself. It is a kind of knowledge we cannot
come by in any other way. No one can state his awful dereliction, so
he curses or prays, or both, and builds a fiction. He realizes a cast of
characters and a narrative. What his characters are and what they do
and feel represent all their author did not know he knew.

Fiction is a bizarre exaggeration of mere actuality. The author must
exaggerate in order to communicate at all; otherwise his fiction would
not be necessary or believable. But it still must satisfy one's knowl-
edge of the way things happen or one's feeling that they could not
have been otherwise, given what one knows or learns about the char-
acters. Therefore, a kind of necessity or inevitability rules it, in that the
action follows given conditions, and nothing else could have hap-
pened.

Since these conditions lie partly in the nature of the character, the
inevitability depends partly on him. Cinderella, for example, has no
significance apart from the circumstances she helped to produce, or
their resolution which justifies her nature. Like any actual person,
therefore, the character in a novel is a circumstantial being. His ex-
istence is an acute metaphor of the human condition, for unless he
participates in the affairs which contain him unless he acts the
fictional character has no life at all. He must have efficacy, or we will
have none of him.

The necessity of fiction, therefore, lies in its believable commentary
on more than itself. In our own lives we cope with things-as-they-are by
assigning them value according to the way they impinge on us. From
our involvements we derive our "values": that is, our convictions, our
dogmas, our ideals which have shown stamina in the course of still
other involvements. Certain of these ideals with particular stamina
seem to be absolute values. But since we derive them only from our
own experience, most of what we call values are fragmentary and are
likely to be at odds. Our just deserts are often contradicted, and this
is why we need fiction.

How to Denature a Novel 35

Our recognition of conflict in actual experience is itself a reordering
(an evaluation) of actuality. Through the liable character, the kind
of knowledge fiction yields is the nature of one's relativity to everything
else. Just as fiction in general is one kind of knowledge about relativity,
so the novel in particular is one way of knowing. (A lyric poem or an
epic or a drama are other ways.) A novel is a long narrative fiction
which appraises at the same time that it represents the mutual involve-
ment of characters.

The essence of the novel lies in the way it represents; in the way it
repeats and amplifies its substance to appraise it. It repeats and ampli-
fies a particular metaphor. All fiction represents by metaphor, by anal-
ogy to things known; and the substance of all narrative fiction is the
metaphor of conflict. The novel's particularity is its appraisal of char-
acters by a various repetition of conflict.

The metaphor of conflict the encounter convenes opposing
forces (emotions, traits, and values, persons and circumstances, or all
of these) in such a way as to localize one's feelings. Conflict tries the
persons and their values by their actions. Cinderella meekly dressing
her step-sisters' hair dramatizes the first condition of the beatitude
which that tale represents.

Action characterizes the heroine of another fiction, The Scarlet
Letter, quite otherwise but just as surely. Hester Prynne first appears
leaving the jail defiantly displaying to the townspeople the scarlet
letter on her bosom. Each of these heroines reveals herself by what she
does, because the gesture of each responds to her involvement. It
makes no difference whether the heroine runs away from the dance,
like Cinderella; or faces the music, like Hester Prynne. The action al-
ways responds to something.

The metaphor of conflict reveals and evaluates because it establishes
the cause of action. This is why we know more about fictional personae
than about persons. In actuality we only vaguely realize most of the
relationships involving us. But conflict organizes actual confusion. It
clarifies cause, creates the necessity of choice, and therefore makes
action a response.

Fiction has a capacity for conjecture and discovery about human
beings beyond the actual and customary extent of one's knowledge.

36 The Denatured Novel

Even more, it stresses what it clarifies. The need for resolution inheres
in any complication, and by emphasizing complication the metaphor
of conflict accentuates the need to resolve. Thus, in most versions of
"Cinderella" the palace ball, which poses the girl's irreconcilable con-
ditions, occurs for three nights.

But "Cinderella" is only a tale. A novel differs from it by the breadth
and depth its length allows. With a plurality of characters the novel
repeats the fact of involvement. It proceeds by addition or by accretion.
It gathers analogues to its subject so as to represent an emerging con-
flict by means of many relevant and contiguous encounters.

The novel's accretion is not just quantitative. Its process can be de-
scribed by a singular verb: the novel intricates its conflicts, so that one
reinforces the others. It is a system of repeated conflicts which variously
echo one another; each new encounter evaluates the others. This is the
way in which the novel appraises as it represents.

This developing of involvement is a way of making the most of
the least material. In painting, for example, a basic fact of composition
is that the parts repeat one another, not literally but with variations.
In music, sequential treatment repeats a motif elsewhere on the scale,
or by another voice or instrument. The most familiar form of repeti-
tion in orchestral scores is the theme-and-variations, although its most
intense use is probably in the fugue, which counterpoints its parts. And
so in fiction: the novel builds a system of comparisons; its conflicts
test opposing values and also, by analogy, one another. Like parallelism
in painting or sequential treatment in music, the dynamics of a novel
exceeds mere restatement for its own sake, but uses it variously to de-
velop an idea. And appraisal inheres in development.

This developing involvement occurs in The Scarlet Letter. The
novel dramatizes sin and confession in a God-centered world. Hester
Prynne has already borne a child to the Reverend Dimmesdale when
her husband, Chillingworth, appears on the scene, and the sins which
the novel dramatizes are committed after the adultery. Dimmesdale
fears to admit his paternity; Chillingworth vows to punish him by tor-
ture; and Hester complies with Chillingworth's trespass.

Each character experiences the crisis of confession in a way that

How to Denature a Novel 37

variously repeats the others. Hester's private confession to Dimmes-
dale of her compliance in -his torture begets Dimmesdale's confession
to the world. But the shock kills him, and so Chillingworth is denied
the opportunity to shrive himself. Chillingworth's failure to confess
most certainly damns him.

The dialogues which render these encounters (between Hester and
her child, between husband and lover, between Hester and her hus-
band and then her lover) gradually reorder the early encounter be-
tween Hester and her community into a conflict between pride and
humility in everyone concerned. What gradually emerges is the em-
pirical proof of the human dereliction. But because this is fiction the
representation cannot be stated. When Hawthorne tried to state it he
failed.

In his conclusion he selected a moral and exhorted the reader to
"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst,
yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred." But however rele-
vant his message, its statement terminates the possibilities of the fic-
tion. It scarcely matches, or even connotes, the dynamics of the book.

Mere accurate statement fails to match the amplitude of any fiction,
no matter what the fiction's intricacy. This is equally true of a much
simpler novel, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936). In
this book the warring elements of an entire society convene precisely
in the heroine's struggle to find both love and security within the nar-
row limits of respectability. The novel contains a truism which seems
to stitch it all up. One of Scarlett's many counselors, a grande dame
on a neighboring plantation, tells her, "It's a very bad thing for a
woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's
faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again." But this cal-
culable wisdom cannot sum up Gone with the Wind any more than
Hawthorne's exhortation to be true compends The Scarlet Letter.

There is more to say about these novels than that they are both fic-
tion, They are superficially similar but profoundly different, and this
fact reveals a lot about the nature and the denaturing of the novel.
The similarities are obvious. Each heroine has been cast out of her
community: one, for adultery; the other, for stealing husbands and for

38 The Denatured Novel

breaking most of the lesser rules for a lady; and both are punished.
Both novels are didactic, as all novels are, but Gone with the Wind,
the popular novel, is far more doctrinaire.

Despite Hawthorne's tiresome moralizing in The Scarlet Letter,
the moral issue of Gone -with the Wind is clearly more explicit. We
know exactly where the heroine stands at all times and where she
ought to stand. No fuzzy equivocations mar Scarlett O'Hara's indict-
ment; her retribution is tidy and immediately satisfying.

The difference between these novels lies in the moral involvement
of The Scarlet Letter and the moral posture of Gone with the Wind.
Hester's violation of Dimmesdale's soul makes her suffer the fears of
the damned. But Scarlett O'Hara, who has violated many individuals
in her attempt to get another woman's husband, suffers merely the
frustration of never getting what she wants. What seems like her just
deserts in Gone with the Wind is really only an expedient like the
prosecution of a gangster for income-tax evasion.

One novel develops an involvement comparable to the unresolved
complexity of the world. The other novel evades complexity and sim-
plifies its subject. In The Scarlet Letter Hester's apprehension over
the nature of her illegitimate child leads her to interpret the child's in-
cessant questions about Dimmesdale and Chillingworth as God's own
ministrations. Hester's inference of divine revelation is what finally
discovers the analogies in all of the conflicts of the novel. But in Gone
with the Wind there is no such developing involvement. Its heroine's
conflict is merely but repeatedly asserted. In Gone with the Wind
there is a much clearer conflict between a heroine's instinctive desires
and her inhibitions. Her society will not countenance her only means
of acquiring the man she wants. But the dialogues between the heroine
and the other characters, which render this conflict, never get any-
where. Scarlett repeatedly rejects everyone's advice. The trouble is that
everyone's mind, including hers, is already made up. Nothing changes
except the scene.

The simplistic treatment and the moral posture go together in pop-
ular fiction, and they have nothing to do with the agony of appraisal.
Nothing ever changes in Gone with the Wind because the heroine's
ideal of happiness is unobtainable. But the dream of it is durable. As

Hoiv to Denature a Novel 39

long as there are new events to sustain it, the dream goes on and on.
That is why so many millions of people have sat up all night with it,
indulging in the heroine's miseries, anticipating her success. The goal
in The Scarlet Letter, however, is not happiness but salvation and the
awful crisis of self -appraisal.

Hawthorne's novel is a re-creation of the values of the seventeenth-
century Puritan community two hundred years after the fact. Ac-
cording to the doctrine of this community salvation is far more pos-
sible than happiness on earth. Like the dream of happiness, it is also
based on human failure, but achieving Grace requires at least a life of
continuous and agonizing doubt. This takes work of the sort that denies
happiness one reason why the quest for salvation often degenerates
into a misguided pursuit of happiness.

If Hawthorne had really wanted to match the success of that "d d
mob of scribbling women" he complained of, The Scarlet Letter
would have needed a thorough revision. He had an enchanting situa-
tion: his heroine had a husband at home and a lover-at-large (this
caused the book to be banned in Russia and the film to be bowdlerized
in the United States, so he was on the right track), but he spoiled it.
Hester had already had her lover, thereby removing the delicious frus-
tration on which the popular heroine's dream of happiness thrives.

What small popular appeal remained after that error Hawthorne
also ruined: Hester was not at all concerned about the security of her
home or about becoming acceptable to the community. She was, in
fact, accepted long before the book was over. Meanwhile, the author
made it obvious that the real subject of his novel was the awful crises of
human dereliction. As far as book sales were concerned, Hawthorne
botched it.

This is merely another way of saying that Gone with the Wind, the
popular novel, offers an utterly simplistic view of the human condi-
tion. It has stylized the metaphor of conflict. It has made the conflict
tidy, explicit and literally repetitive. This is how to denature the novel:
attenuate or thin out the system of analogous conflicts. The terms
"serious" and "popular" fiction bear on this fact. The "popular" novel
is usually a denatured one.

Ideally the novel accumulates thought and action in such a manner

40 The Denatured Novel

as to exploit analogies to a conflict, and so appraises as it represents.
Addition of any new analogous substance necessarily moves attention
from one point to another and forces comparison of some sort. This
psychological movement is peculiar to each fiction (and different, for
instance, in The Scarlet Letter and Gone with the Wind) . The simpler,
stylized comparison always marks the popular novel.

Narrative is what moves the attention. Bookmen in the trade refer
to "story," which means that quality resulting from a stress upon the
narrative. The "story quality" exercises the desire to resolve things.
It exploits and satisfies a sense of destination: the universal feeling for
that consummate end toward which events tend to move. With this
sense everybody transforms his own actual experience. Thus, the
"story quality" the emphasis on narrative readily distinguishes one
novel from another. It distinguishes Moll Flanders, for instance, from
Pamela; from Madame Bovary or Sister Carrie; from Marjorie Morn-
ingstar; from The Scarlet Letter or Gone with the Wind in fact,
each of these from the others.

This is an aesthetic, not a historical, matter. Two novels by one
writer can differently exploit the narrative. Henry James's The Am-
bassadors, for example, which appraises Lambert Strether's growing
realization of certain circumstances, shows almost no concern for re-
solving the situation in which he finds himself. But James's The Ameri-
can has a strong sense of story: of the need to improve the unfortunate
state of Christopher Newman's courtship; so strong, in fact, that
James's conclusion in terms other than the story's anticipation becomes
an anti-climax.

The specious clarity of Gone with the Wind, repeatedly resolving
the same conflict, is the result of this story quality. The way a writer
exploits this emphasis on resolution, in fact, controls the scope and
therefore the meaning of his fiction. Two novels might appear in all
other respects to be extraordinarily similar, but their differing empha-
ses on the resolution of the same conflict will make their entire sub-
jects different.

Two such novels are The Plutocrat (1927), by Booth Tarkington,
and Dodsworth (1929), by Sinclair Lewis. They were contemporary
and both were best sellers. They share the subject of the American

How to Denature a Novel 41

abroad; they both endeavor to define the American's qualities, which
they commonly assess by European standards of behavior. Each novel
characterizes its American hero Earl J. Tinker in Tarkington's, Sam
Dodsworth in Lewis' by comparing him with his opposite, and so
demonstrating assumed national traits in a tabloid fashion.

These novels even arrive at approximately the same estimation of
the heroes. Sam Dodsworth, in fact, explicitly admires his predecessor,
Earl Tinker. All in all, their similarity might at first suggest an extraor-
dinary coincidence in literary history. Yet Lewis' novel presents a
symposium of irreconcilable attitudes, and Tarkington's novel resolves
the debate.

The difference between the novels is not philosophical but formal.
Tarkington's novel develops a conflict in terms of Earl J. Tinker's
journey across North Africa, with each episode disclosing some new
realization about Tinker by witnesses who come to scoff and stay to
praise. The money this Rotarian showers on the province of Algeria
somehow validates his innocent, outlandish opinions about the cul-
ture of the Roman Empire. Tinker inspects ancient sewer systems and
reconstructs the Roman culture in terms of Saturday-night shopping,
bond issues for war monuments, and public utilities. He resembles first
a careless barbarian, then the Roman himself, and finally a formidable
priest of civic religion. This contradiction between what Tinker unhap-
pily seems to be and what he ultimately turns out to be, prods atten-
tion.

Tinker's low estate in the opinion of more pretentious Americans,
at the start of the novel, obviously needs correction, but Lewis' novel
omits the discrepancy between what seems and what is. Dodsworth's
journey from Zenith, U.S.A., to the Old World causes the reassess-
ment of two cultures, each in the other's terms. But the fact of the
matter the mutual differences between Americans and Europeans
prevails because each apologist argues from only a limited understand-
ing of the other's culture. Dodsworth comes to realize this, but nothing
needs to be resolved. His final realization is quite consistent with the
situation in which he started. It merely explains the antipathies which
have obviously existed throughout Dodsworth's journey.

Tarkington and Lewis wrote a great deal of apparently similar fie-

42 The Denatured Novel

tion, in that both worked with large, obvious subjects: the complacency
of the small-town mind, the mores of business, and the confusion of
ethical ideals in America. Tarkington anticipated Lewis in all of these
ideas, just as The Plutocrat preceded Dodsworth, but they wrote from
completely different views of their common experience. In his best
novels Lewis developed these static ideas, with many analogies, into
resonant fiction. When he tried (as he did once or twice) to pare
down a novel to a narrative which had to arrive somewhere, he wrote a
flat, dull novel. Lewis never could write a story like Tarkington's. Nor
did Tarkington ever win the Nobel Prize.

The story quality, as in The Plutocrat, conveys the sense of becom-
ing. It does so by violating one's natural inclination for order, by dis-
turbing the stability of any given situation. The habit of representing
disturbance by the metaphor of conflict is a token of our relative view
of things which impinge on us, which makes fiction necessary in the
first place. So, in the merely relative view, whenever one's convictions
are forcefully contradicted they lose their comforting surety until such
time as they can again prevail.

The humiliations forced on the virtuous Cinderella are intolerable;
so are the ignorant opinions which contradict Booth Tarkington's
Earl Tinker. Something must be done about it. Likewise, the ignominy
which the townspeople heap on Hester Prynne contradicts her ad-
mirable self-sufficiency and honest devotion to her child; and the mores
of Scarlett O'Hara's world suddenly seem to deny her preservation. But
the only way to relieve the discomfort these given conditions cause is
to project them into an action which will prove them wrong. One
needs to complete the story in order to gratify his wishes for the way
things ought to be.

To some degree this reaching sense conveys all of fiction. But the
story quality, exciting the need for stability, is a simplifying force. It
tends to ignore variation or development, to override the complexity in
any arrangement of conditions. The degree to which the narrative pre-
sides over the fiction that contains it is what distinguishes a resonant
novel from a denatured one. An author can exploit this sense of becom-
ing merely for its own sake, as in most denatured novels, or he can use
it as the means of development, the means of intricating any material

How to Denature a Novel 43

into some reflexive structure. The sense of becoming can be diverted
into a resonant system of analogies, which is the essence of the novel
form.

The comparison between The Plutocrat and Dodsworth is no special
case. The distinction between a dominant narrative and a resonant
system of analogies discriminates among all novels that seem otherwise
to be similar. A well-established category of merchandise in booksell-
ing, for example, is the religious novel (the historical novel with a
Biblical subject); and the peculiar nature of the invented substance in
religious novels clarifies this distinction.

The New Testament usually furnishes the conflict, which they all
dramatize, between the Christian way and the human way. Three
novels about the last teachings and the death of Christ illustrate how
differently the same historical evidence can be fictionalized. The Naza-
rene (1939), by Scholem Asch, is a resonant system of analogies whose
subject is the human dilemma. The Big Fisherman (1949) by Lloyd
Douglas, and The Silver Chalice (1952) by Thomas Costain are dom-
inating narratives which solve the dilemma.

The Nazarene is the most fantastic and the most believable. Its
action moves back and forth between Israel in the year of the Cruci-
fixion and a modern European city, whose inhabitants recall the his-
torical events. The modern characters are reincarnations of a Roman
soldier and of a Jew who took part in the original drama and is now
engaged in translating a manuscript of the Gospel according to Judas
Iscariot. The reincarnation amplifies the terms of the original conflict
and perpetuates the old dilemma. Hence the novel's illusion of a con-
tinuum. Nothing is resolved, but everything is realized.

The Big Fisherman is more cautious than The Nazarene, more au-
thentic in its details, but it fails the illusion of reality because the dom-
inating narrative insists on a conclusion. The novel tells of Simon
Peter's relationship with Jesus, but the narrative which dramatizes
Peter's dilemma is a love story involving an Arabian princess who
has become a Christian. The whole book hangs on the problem of
her winning the reluctant prince on her own terms and, of course,
she does.

In the same way a love story dominates Costain's religious novel. The

44 The Denatured Novel

Silver Chalice sets out to dramatize the irreconcilability of self and
Christ through the struggle of the disciples to preserve the cup of the
Last Supper from the Jewish High Priest. But the invented substance
takes over this idea. It concerns a blundering young man who cannot
make up his mind about Christianity, a conflict dramatized by his love
for two women. Early in the novel this unfortunate person declares his
love to the wrong woman and then marries the right one without lov-
ing her, and this intolerable beginning naturally precipitates an end.
His discovery that he loves his wife (hundreds of pages later) is so final,
in fact, that it pre-empts the struggle of the disciples with which the
novel started.

The difference between The Nazarene and these other two versions
of the human dilemma is the difference between a resonant novel and
a dominating narrative, or the difference between a round fiction and
two flat ones. The flat ones are denatured. All three are competent, but
the two that feature the narrative are simpler and more limiting. This
distinction is basic; it goes beyond the novel form. In all of the fine
arts, in fact, the reaching sense dominates what for one reason or an-
other is called "popular" expression.

It happens that the terms "serious" and "popular" art in this formal
sense convey an even more explicit distinction in other art forms, as
for instance, the distinction between illustration and painting. The
illustration promises a destination. It reorganizes the actual subject so
as to urge attention forward to a particular destination. In advertising
design the destination is a product or a specific idea. The illustrations
of fiction, in books and magazines, likewise anticipate the climax of a
story.

Illustration on magazine covers often suggests a whole story in this
way. Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post, for in-
stance, illustrate the pregnant moment that point in time when some
significance is about to become obvious to the persons in the scene: the
view, from above a sand lot, of the home-run ball speeding toward a
window, just before the players become fugitives; or the precise mo-
ment when the girl discovers her brother reading her diary.

The significance" of such scenes is not the predictability but the in-
evitability of a climax. Rube Goldberg makes fun of this inevitability.

How to Denature a Novel 45

When he illustrates his contrivance to water a buttonhole flower, in-
volving eighteen mechanical operations and the conditioned reflex of
a small seal, the viewer patiently follows the directions of the diagram
from steps "A" through "S," or whatever, conditioned by the fact that
the end will come. His is a kind of shaggy-dog art, which exploits the
desire for completion and then offers an anti-climax. The humor de-
pends on the ludicrous discrepancy between effort and accomplish-
ment, but no one would laugh at this without a prior agreement of the
end in view.

A painting, unlike an illustration, exploits the sense of becoming to
create a different subject. It tells no story; it concerns itself, its parts
and their mutual relationship. A painting represents space and planes
of energy. Its subject is the amplification and development or contra-
diction of a curve, or of light or darkness, or buoyancy, or brilliance or
weight.

The idea of pure painting, or non-illustrative art, is not very old a
hundred years, more or less; it did not develop until there were public
galleries to encourage it. But even within this short time the medium
has become its own emphatic subject. The styles of painting in the
dozen years which bracketed World War I show the preoccupation.
Duchamp's notorious "Nude Descending a Staircase," like all the
others which upset the visitors to the Armory Show of 1913, is really
about itself. Cubism, Futurism and Orphism were attempts in different
ways to evolve the same illusion the simultaneity of experiences
which actually occur during elapsed time.

By correlating several states of being, the painting itself becomes the
subject. Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror," whose mirrored image dis-
torts an already deformed original, has the movement of a continuum.
The eye's unending shuttle between distortion and distortion-squared
exploits the sense of becoming and makes the viewer collaborate in
realizing a new, resonant subject. With similar intent Balla composed
in one painting many separate stages in the continuous movement of
the "Dog on a Leash." The painting itself is the totality of experience;
this is why in Duchamp's painting it does not matter that the nude
descending a staircase never gets there.

The contemporary vogue of abstract expressionism, which denies all

46 The Denatured Novel

representation, merely emphasizes the vast difference between illustra-
tion and painting. A certain painting and a certain illustration may
derive from a common subject. The illustration renders an awareness
of that subject; but the painting renders awareness of the medium and
the means which dramatize it. If the illustration succeeds, the subject
from which it derives comes alive; if the painting succeeds, the medium
itself becomes vital.

The same formal significance also distinguishes among musical com-
positions. The standard juke-box song, for example, (conventionally
thirty-two bars divided into four sections, three of which state the same
melody) is a skeletal sonata form; but it emphasizes the melody, and
shortens the developmental section to the length of each of the three
melodic statements. Consciously or not, everyone acknowledges this
stylization when referring to popular "tunes." The accompanying lyrics
develop a story congenial to the melody and, like the melody, exploit
a sense of arrival.

This stress on melody actually emphasizes the movement of becom-
ing, for it is the property of any melody any succession of tones to
move toward stability. The ear responds to the four active tones in the
octave scale by anticipating their resolution to the nearest inactive
tone. Consequently, certain pulls and tensions inhere in any melody.
The melody of a popular tune, which normally complies with the ex-
pected resolution of active tones, is relatively predictable.

What is called "serious" music, on the other hand, characteristically
delays these resolutions, continuing to pull and play on the tensions of
the active tones. This suggests a preoccupation with the medium itself,
with the relationships between the tones. The essence of jazz, for in-
stance, is developmental and harmonic, not melodic. By virtue of each
instrument playing against the rest, the jazz composition continuously
refrains from resolution. But the music called "swing" is a stylization of
jazz. It simplifies the developmental quality and emphasizes the mel-
ody much as Tin Pan Alley modifies the sonata form.

As for the novel form, the narrative capitalizes on the need of an end
to things. Unburdened by interference, it correlates the universal desire
to correct the present by projecting it into the future. But any develop-
ment along the way which delays the resolution of the narrative frus-
trates the reader's sense of futurity. The novelist who wants to explore

How to Denature a Novel 47

the nature of the conflict itself rather than its resolution, therefore, is
at odds with most of his readers.

This has always been the great contradiction in the form itself. The
novel builds a system of analogous conflicts. It is a means of forcing the
reader to a larger awareness of a subject. But to accomplish this it must
work with a conflict the reader naturally wants resolved. This contra-
diction explains why James Fenimore Cooper made his novels tell two
stories at once. It explains why The Plutocrat is more immediately sat-
isfying than Dodsworth, and why The Scarlet Letter was not so popular
as Hawthorne could have wished.

It explains why Gone with The Wind and The Big Fisherman and
The Silver Chalice are tabloid versions of experience. The fact that
they are caricatures explains their popularity. They are one kind of
compromise between the novel form and the commercial auspices of
the artifact itself.

The book trade has always encouraged the stylization of the novel,
the thinning out of analogous conflicts to get on with the story. The
reasons are all a matter of economic incentive. In the present day these
reasons are complex, but they all lie in the kind of product various mar-
keters of fiction (the magazine, the reprinter and the film studio) de-
mand of the trade publisher. And the publisher has always managed to
convey his desires to an author.

Even after it is completed a novel can be stylized for profit. It can be
edited or abridged or adapted to another medium and popularized in
the process. The original can be simplified: the narrative made to dom-
inate and the analogies thinned out, so as to shift the emphasis from
an experience to its resolution. This is how to denature a novel.

This is also the process by which most contemporary novels are bred.
Many times repeated, under the auspices of commercial publication,
stylizing causes a peculiar continuity of the novel form. What repeat-
edly happens is that many novels stylize a few that have made a lot of
money.

Stylizing begins with the economic fact that a commercially success-
ful book creates a market for others like it. By this fact the economics
of book publishing continually modifies literary theory. But book pub-
lishing has its own complexities, which in many strange ways and
often for the wrong reasons have shaped the contemporary novel.

Chapter III

The Clay Feet of Polk
Franklin

Any similarity between this publisher and any
persons living or dead is purely coincidental,
because everyone knows publishers are not real.

"ACCORDING to legend, book publishers move in mysterious ways. If
not clairvoyant, we are at least marvelously intuitive, as we select, de-
fine, and propagate the word.'* So Lewis Gaynor, president of the pub-
lishing house of Polk & Franklin, sketched the opening of the forth-
coming Bowker Lecture on book publishing. Gaynor had decided to
call his lecture "Book Publishing: The Insular Industry."

"One reason for this legend," he continued, "is the crazy-quilt nature
of the book industry, It is a congeries of small, diverse, independent
entities, so diffuse that the solution of one economic problem causes a
worse one somewhere else. The book trade proceeds by exceptions.
Most publishers operate as retailers; manufacturers occasionally be-
come publishers; the economic importance of retailers is not book-
selling; and we all spend our advertising allotments to impress our col-
leagues in the trade. No wonder the myth of the publisher's intuition!"

This is Gaynor's disenchanted view. A year ago when he accepted
the invitation to add to that distinguished series of annual lectures, he
had no idea he would make such a frightening statement in public,
at least. But the more he has thought about the industry's problems the

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 49

more clearly he has seen that they are exactly like his own. Except for
the Polk & Franklin books that are sold by direct-by-mail methods,
Gaynor has no idea who reads what he publishes or why customers buy
what they do. Polk & Franklin is, in fact, the "most average" publish-
ing house in the industry. The story of this firm explains the economic
attrition of literature.

I
THE NOBLE IMAGE

Gaynor has cause to think as he does about this jackpot business.
During the past twelve months P&F has made an enormous profit on a
Deluxe ("limited") Edition of the "Song of Solomon/ 7 profusely illus-
trated, handsomely boxed, and retailing for $17.50. But Gaynor lost
his shirt on the best history of the French and Indian War he had ever
read. The house has also lost heavily on a fine sensitive novel by a
sensitive young novelist. Also, an expensive book about elephant guns
has had to be remaindered sold at a fraction of its cost to a mail-order
house.

The editor of the novel and the book about elephant guns has, of
course, been fired. He ought to have known better. He has listened to
an agent's sweet-talk in the hope that the agent might someday send
him some really salable manuscripts. But this editor's mistake did not
explain why practically no one bought the really great book about the
French and Indian War, which Gaynor had personally promoted.

In the first draft of his lecture Gaynor sneered at the myth of the
publisher's intuition, by quoting O. H. Cheney's Economic Survey of
the Book Industry ( 1931 ) . This definitive study of the American book
trade begins by asserting that "the industry is organized around causes
and effects about as related as dice throws," and for this reason publish-
ers themselves have come to believe in their mythical intuition.

"The book industry," Gaynor quoted, "is generally believed to have
no rules, only exceptions. That is why so many actions in the industry
are not only not planned or controlled, but they are not even moti-
vated. Many are hardly intuitive, nothing but tropisms."

50 The Denatured Novel

On second thought Gaynor crossed this passage out. No need to
flaunt the fact. The book trade already knew it, and the layman might
get the wrong idea. After all, book publishing has always been a per-
sonal venture, as a genealogy of publishing houses in the United States
would prove. It would show the persistence with which firms have split
apart like amoebas into new and whole organisms. Although publishers
may now know statistically more about their operations than they knew
thirty years ago, most of the old vagaries persist, intensified by steadily
rising costs. The organization of Polk & Franklin testifies to this.

This firm acquired its present personality after the crisis which began
in its trade book department* in 1948 and finally led to a change in
management. In that year the entire industry produced 9,897 books,
and Polk & Franklin accounted for one per cent of the business. It was
only one of about 1,100 publishers reporting to the Bureau of the Cen-
sus in 1948; but to an industry in which a few publishers issue most of
the books P&F was important.

In 1948 a few more than three hundred publishers produced eighty-
five per cent of the total of new books or editions, and only fifteen pub-
lishers produced more than one hundred. Polk & Franklin's 106 titles
placed the house modestly among the leaders. In the past fourteen
years it has kept pace with the industry's increased production; in 1958
P&F published 1 34 titles.

The public image of Polk & Franklin carries dignity. The firm has
always published distinguished books of history and economics, and
to these the works of a dozen well-known English and American nov-
elists were added in the early thirties, when it absorbed the list of an-
other firm. These additions have attracted other novelists, one of whom
the trade regards as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Five Pulitzer
Prizes have already gone to Polk & Franklin authors. The works of the
two contemporary poets on its backlist have received academic ap-
proval; and the National Book Award to one, followed by two honorary
degrees, has eased the awful strain of a losing venture.

The backlist, as Gaynor likes to point out, is rich and varied. Many

* "Trade book" is the publishing industry's name for a book sold primarily to
a retail book store, or wholesaler, for resale to the public, in contrast to a textbook,
or a "direct-mail" book that is, one designed to be sold direct to the purchaser by
mail solicitation.

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 51

motives have built it: the desire to make money, to attract more good
authors, to exploit a timely interest, to publish enduring books, to es-
tablish a certain image of the house in the trade. Were any of its
editors to make a public statement, however, he would say that Polk &
Franklin has always tried to publish the best book in any given cate-
gory. This statement carries a faint odor of respectability. It also makes
"best" a relative word, and accommodates those inspirational novels
which continue to sell year after year without benefit of advertising.
(P&F's unauthorized edition of Charles Sheldon's In His Steps still
sells five hundred copies a year.)

Polk & Franklin is proud of its literary reputation. When the house
advertises an "unconventional" novel to use one of the trade's ambig-
uous terms the retailer can expect a serious formal experiment, not a
prurient story. Although institutional advertising notoriously fails to
sell books, this company has for years purchased space in the literary
supplements during the first week in July, to inform people that read-
ing is worthwhile. Its letters to authors explaining the rejection of a
manuscript invariably cite that manuscript's literary inadequacy in-
stead of its poor sales potential.

Although P&F has made its reputation publishing general books
through the trade, its trade department's sixty titles a year comprise
less than half its titles and only a quarter of its volume. After World
War II the firm established a college text department, and a juvenile
list within its trade department. The company has always operated a
mail-order enterprise. Not many persons know the proportionate in-
come from these departments, for Polk & Franklin, with stock held by
one family, issues no public statement of profit and loss; but it is no
secret that P&F's bread-and-butter is its mail-order department.

Direct-mail publishing, a way of making books to order, is the in-
dustry's most flagrant example of the synthetic book. The publisher
assembles a mailing list of persons with known interests; he then manu-
factures the contents of a book to gratify those interests and sends a
description of it to the names he has collected. It always sells and the
expense is minimal. The publisher can even use and often does use
his mailing list to solicit instructions for the next book.

The mail-order business at P&F is mainly nourished by the Franklin

52 The Denatured Novel

Library of Practical Living. This venture makes it possible for the firm
to lose a certain amount of money in its trade department and still
show a corporate profit. The importance of the Franklin Library (there
has never been a Franklin in the firm ) has always been affirmed by its
founder, the elder Horace Polk.

Issued in celebration of the company's twenty-fifth anniversary in
1922, Folk's autobiography explains how his publishing venture began.
These personal reminiscences of Folk's own success would be at home
in the Franklin Library. Having worked his way through college, Polk
took over the management of his uncle's dress-pattern magazine; and
through this connection the young man learned the virtues of hard
work and frugal living (he earned eight dollars a week). He found in
his work still other unique opportunities. When the magazine's printer
went bankrupt with an issue on the press, Horace Polk received as
payment for his duress the unbound sheets for an edition of Poor
Richard's Almanac. Some of these he bound and tried to sell through
the subscription list of his magazine, but with small success.

Polk persisted, however, and made what turned out to be a brilliant
decision. He enclosed the rest of the sheets in a letter to each of his
subscribers, asking how she would like to have this book brought up-
to-date. The return mail was so encouraging that he hired a lay
preacher to write a manuscript to order. Polk entitled this manuscript
The Complete Home Treasury of Successful Planning for Health and
Happiness in Your Life. He cleaned up with it.

The young publisher then set about acquiring a list. He purchased
two other books: a home nursing manual, which he titled The Plain
Mans Pathway to Health, and a cook book with a large mailing list
already compiled for it. He larded the recipes in Bridget's Food of Life
with inspirational messages. All three volumes, uniformly bound in
sky-blue, sold as fast as the expanding mailing list could accommodate.
Other ventures, like the garden manuals Polk occasionally developed,
prospered by mail order also. Later Polk established a book club to fur-
nish his subscribers with similar products at a slight discount auto-
matically. But through the years the Franklin Library showed the great-
est stamina.

Contemporary mail-order titles (devoted to practical philosophy and

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 5 3

religion, to public manners, and to simplified psychology) sell about
600,000 copies a year. The archetypes are still around. Five times re-
vised, now illustrated with quaint woodcuts, the cook book has sold
3,000,000 copies. The home-nursing book has been restyled as a loose-
leaf manual with subscription supplements. The Complete Home
Treasury of Successful Planning for Health and Happiness in Your
Life is still one of the book club's membership premiums. When the
young members of the editorial staff scorn the founder's enterprise as
"Folk's Practical Piety," they are likely to be chastised.

The trade department came to Polk & Franklin in the early thirties,
when it absorbed the firm of Worth and Loesser, whose list included a
popular history of American military victories and a best-selling report
of prohibition and organized vice both edited by Worth. Then
Worth retired, and Loesser, a literary man, became the editor of Polk
& Franklin's newly acquired trade department. Loesser brought with
him the works of a French novelist and three British writers. He also
brought a passionate interest in American writing, and largely because
of his efforts during the next twenty-five years, P&F now has a backlist
of distinguished fiction.

The fiction list also followed other personal interests. Since the
1930'$ Polk & Franklin has published sea stories because of Lewis Gay-
nor's enthusiasm. This began while he was the company's sales man-
ager. Gaynor had maintained a house in Maine, made his own lobster
pots, and cruised off-shore. One day an agent had a hunch and sent to
Gaynor the manuscript of a novel with a Down-East setting. Gaynor
immediately became a reader and buyer of fiction. For the past fif-
teen years historical novels, particularly about New England seaports,
have been prominent on the list. Gaynor has even ventured once or
twice with novels about Indians, a subject he hopes will permit him to
cash in on the new interest in domestic archeology.

Gaynor sees this development of a list of fiction reinforced by re-
gional and scientific interests as an example of sound marketing. "Ev-
eryone knows there are not enough book readers," he says. "I learned
that years ago from Horace Polk. He taught me what to do about it.
He made me read Brander Matthews on the fallacy of trying to please
'the taste of the public' as if there were only one public, with one

54 The Denatured Novel

taste." Gaynor's standard speech to retail associations, entitled "The
Big 'M' in Marketing/' develops this argument.

Any competent book, he maintains, will find its small and usually
insignificant public or market: regular readers devoted to a given sub-
ject, plus a few additional gift purchasers. But the problem in selling
and building a book is to get beyond this limited market, to find
many small groups of readers who might one way or another respond
to it. "Call this congregation of many groups the book's Market with
a capital 'M'. Every book should be an overlap, to capitalize on its pos-
sible interest to many markets." He explains that the publisher may
break even on his initial cost by the sale of the book to its small and
known market, but the book will prosper only as its sales exploit the
interest of many marginal groups.

This philosophy of marketing of learning a book's basic readership,
then tailoring it for sales beyond that readership accounts for the so-
called "house book" at P&F, conceived by an editor and jobbed out for
writing. Three or four house books, primarily non-fiction, are contin-
ually in process at Polk & Franklin. But whatever reassurance they pro-
vide in calculating cost and profit, their timely nature usually limits
their period of sale. The house book is a one-shot.

At the opposite extreme, unsolicited manuscripts, which offer the
least assurance, deluge the publisher. Polk & Franklin receives about
2,500 unsolicited manuscripts a year, virtually all of which it rejects.
Editorial assistants empty the slush box after each morning's mail, re-
turning the impossible manuscripts to their authors and forwarding
the few promising ones to an editor for a second reading. Occasionally
one gets on the agenda of the weekly editorial meeting, and possibly
one a year will be published. But Polk & Franklin dares not forego this
expensive procedure which might sometime yield another Gone with
the Wind. Most publishable manuscripts come from literary agents,
from published authors, and from ideas conceived in the firm. Consid-
ering all their sources of supply, the editors of Polk & Franklin say "no"
ten or twelve times a day and "yes" about once a week.

One editor's personal convictions usually determine the firm's deci-
sion to publish any given manuscript. This conviction must concern
more than sales. Shortly before his retirement, Horace Polk installed

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 55

in every office in the company a framed copy of a statement by one of
the trade's leading advertising agencies. "People Are More Alike than
Anybody/ 7 says the copy. "A publisher who prints a book because he
likes it usually finds that many people agree with him." And it con-
tinues: "A publisher who doesn't like a book but prints it anyway often
discovers that most people agree with him." Lewis Gaynor has en-
couraged this idealism in his own way. Every editor at P&F knows that
he had better not make more than one mistake a year.

The editor must temper his enthusiasm for a manuscript by consid-
ering the sales records of others like it. Gaynor calls it "exploring a
book's possibilities." Since no editor has all the facts since his own
recollections include only the past fifty or sixty manuscripts he has
read he must test his convictions against the devil's advocates whom
he meets each week at the trade department's editorial conference:
other editors, and the heads of the production, sales, advertising, pub-
licity, and business-management departments, who pass judgment on
manuscripts, on ideas for books, and on books-in-process.

II
RANDOM HARVEST

It was in one of these weekly conferences late in 1948, when Gaynor
was still sales manager, that all the trouble in the trade department
started, although no one knew it at the time. According to the minutes
of this meeting, discussion centered on two books: a war novel and an
autobiography. The novel came from one of Loesser's authors who sub-
mitted two chapters and an outline of a war story. It was his second
novel. The first, although well-reviewed, had sold only 4,700 copies,
but P&F had recovered its costs by selling the reprint rights for a paper-
bound edition. Even though the house held an option on this new
manuscript at the original terms, calling for no advance to the author,
publishing it would be risky.

The other manuscript, the autobiography of a country banker, had
been submitted by an agent. One of the younger editors at Polk &
Franklin reported: "Its earthy observations and brash episodes of small-

56 The Denatured Novel

town living are very contagious, but the manuscript needs thorough
revision." George Tasker, another editor, had helpfully summed it up:
"You mean it stinks but it's great."

After a fruitful discussion of dirty books, the group considered the
problem of how best to collaborate with the author. One way was to
return the manuscript to the author for rewriting (for which the agent
would first demand a contract for eventual publication); another way
was to purchase the idea and have the book ghost-written; or, some-
where between, to offer the author a contract that would provide for
the house to be reimbursed out of the author's royalties for the exten-
sive editorial revision planned by the firm.

(Had this particular manuscript first been submitted to George
Tasker, it would have come before this group as a finished product.
Through an agent, Tasker has frequently signed an author of an ailing
manuscript to a contract, whereby Tasker rewrites the book for a share
of the author's royalties and then presents the manuscript to P&F.
Since an editor must one way or another provide his publisher with
marketable books, everyone prospers by such an arrangement. Tasker
has a knack with house books, or what might be called a pure notion of
book sales. He has even offered to compile and edit a Treasury of Filthy
Religious Wood-Cuts to prove that P&F could profit enormously by
tapping the immense reservoir of illiterate book-buyers.)

Of fourteen books the group discussed, according to the minutes of
this meeting, seven were rejected and five were tabled for lack of in-
formation, although in the case of three of these it was decided that
"Mr. Gaynor's sales force will get a market check," meaning a positive
endorsement from a few large booksellers on the decision to publish.

As for the novel, Loesser was directed to canvass the possibilities of
a reprint edition and of a movie sale. The minutes continue: "Mr.
Loesser will also discuss with the author's agent the possibilities of
sharing first-serial rights." This, of course, the agent would refuse if he
knew his business, but P&F wanted a talking point for any compromise
that might occur. They would need every break to recover costs on this
book. As for the banker's autobiography, its editor was "directed to
negotiate a contract for publication, which reimburses Polk and Frank-
lin for editorial work."

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 57

The meeting adjourned after the business manager "asked the pro-
duction department to present at the next conference budgets based on
estimated sales of the war novel and of the autobiography." This last
entry would startle anyone but a publisher. Each book would have a
budget before it had a complete manuscript. This budget was intended
to influence all editorial changes.

A book's budget is a way of establishing the number of copies that
must be sold in order for the publisher's investment to be recovered.
This "get-out" figure is arrived at by dividing the edition's manufactur-
ing and advertising costs (expressed in thousands of dollars) by the
publisher's net receipt per copy (expressed in pennies), which is what
remains after the direct costs of discounts, distribution, royalties, adver-
tising and general overhead have been deducted from its sale price.
Dividing the fixed or heavy costs by the net income per copy yields the
number of copies which the publisher must sell to break even.

But the costs in this budget, which determine the "break-even" num-
ber of copies, are themselves projections of an estimated number of
copies to be manufactured in the first place. In short, the budget begins
by assuming part of what it proves. It is merely an educated guess about
where to write-off the product. This necessarily elliptical logic doubt-
less occurs before the manufacture and sale of any consumer product,
but at Polk & Franklin the products are books; in these two instances,
moreover, books scarcely begun before they must submit to a budget.

P&F accepted both of these fragmentary manuscripts, gambling on
an estimated sale of each to its own basic market plus other groups of
possible purchasers. What the publisher accepted was really only the
beginning of an idea, the rest of which would grow and take shape ac-
cording to specifications in the budget. Although each manuscript
originated with its author, the books themselves originated with the
publisher who had, in effect, to conceive them in space. Gaynor always
explained to a new editor that planning a book was like designing a
house from the roof down. He failed to explain the author's problem
in completing such a manuscript, which is more like building a house
from the roof up.

Nothing seemed to be amiss. The minutes of editorial meetings
through the spring of 1949 revealed progress on both books. As ex-

58 The Denatured Novel

pected, Loesser could get no income from magazine rights to the novel,
although two paperback publishers Monster Books and Cleavage
Press had expressed interest. With this possibility of bargaining, P&F
could probably count on a $15,000 advance against paperback sales,
half of which would belong to the author. Accordingly, the business
manager approved a budget based on a break-even sale of 7,500 copies
of a $4.00 novel.

A large package would have to help justify this high retail price. After
the success of The Naked and the Dead the year before, the literary
fashion in war novels called for length and great detail. Loesser would
consult with his author about building into the story several episodes
not presently in the manuscript. One of these, the firm agreed, should
be the American liberation of a brothel. This would give point to an-
other new episode, when the hero would return to the scene of said lib-
eration.

Since the book's sale seemed largely unpredictable, the advertising
to the trade would represent it as a "quality" novel a distinguished
work which Polk & Franklin was "proud to publish.' 7 Now it was time
to name the book or rename it. The author's title, Toe Hold in
Elysium, simply would not do. As Gaynor said, they wanted a quality
novel, not a precious one. The narrative told of a landing operation in
the Mediterranean, Loesser explained. George Tasker, who had read
most of the manuscript, said that if a precise title was wanted, it ought
to be called Honest, I Was Really There. But the minutes state merely:
"After some discussion, the meeting decided on Red Beach Assault.
Mr. Loesser will explain the change in title to the author."

The other book, the banker's autobiography, also progressed. It
would be tailored to fit a 35<>page package retailing at $4.50. The
banker had a success story to tell, and since he also had a way with
homespun maxims, the edition might possibly find a second sale in the
Franklin Book Club. On the strength of this the production depart-
ment requested manufacturers 7 estimates of the cost of producing
20,000 copies.

With general agreement the autobiography was titled They Bank
on Me. The editor penciled a memo to the art department, suggesting
a folksy book jacket; and from several designs he chose a village scene

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 59

in the style of a cross-stitch sampler, with the title set in Olde Alma-
nacke type. By July each book had a production schedule for publica-
tion in the spring of 1950. Under its editor's direction the autobiogra-
phy proceeded more smoothly than the novel. With the final manu-
script ready in September, both its dummy and jacket were prepared
for the December sales meeting. The manuscript of the novel arrived
late in November. By this time the designer and the copy editor had
already prepared its jacket.

Production of dust jackets signaled the start of the advertising cam-
paigns for both books. Each book's budget provided for an advertising
appropriation based on an estimate of its sales to retail booksellers and
to jobbers in advance of publication as low an appropriation as fea-
sible, considering the estimated life of the book. Polk & Franklin nor-
mally spends ten per cent of the gross receipts from advance sales on
advertising the list as a whole, unequally apportioned to individual
titles. Each book must earn its basic share of this kitty: ten per cent of
the net receipts of its own advance sale. A percentage of the difference
between net and gross receipts builds a reserve fund to which the house
can charge extra advertising as needed.

Accordingly, They Bank on Me and Red Beach Assault each had a
basic allotment. The autobiography, with an advance sale of 15,000
copies, at a net of $2.70 per book yielded $4,050. The novel's advance
sale of 5,000 copies yielded an advertising budget of only $1,200. But
gambling on Loesser's enthusiasm (an expensive luxury, as it turned
out) P&F increased its appropriation by another $1,200 from the re-
serve fund. Following publication, each title would have to earn its
advertising by current sales.

These advertising appropriations at Polk & Franklin proceeded from
two principles of book selling. One principle is that a book sells pri-
marily by its own contagion, for which advertising offers no substitute.
One reader tells another, a process which may take months or years for
the book to find its market. Advertising can speed this process, once it
begins, but consumer advertising must follow book sales. Advertising
can anticipate the book only by announcing it, and then only to the
trade.

The purpose of this trade advertising is to impress on everyone con-

60 The Denatured Novel

nected with the book, from author to retailer, how much the publisher
believes in his product. He also promises that everybody can make a
lot of money on it. Ads in Publishers' Weekly are part of this campaign.
But P&F also has a carefully updated mailing list of key persons in the
trade who receive advance copies of the book. These persons also re-
ceive a personal letter from the president of the company, which is to
say one of seven different form letters written in the sales department,
expressing the president's profound faith in this splendid new book. If
bookmen believe all this enough to start talking about the book, the
publisher has spent his money well.

At Polk & Franklin they call the second principle of bookselling "the
infallibility of the advance sale": an overstatement of the publisher's
belief in the reliability of the pre-publication sale to jobbers and retail-
ers as an indication of its ultimate market. Books' budgets are esti-
mates; but even an estimate must begin somewhere. More important,
this advance "sale" influences subsequent editorial decisions. In view
of a book's sales record a year later, its advance sale will help estimate
the possibilities of any similar manuscript in the future.

The advance sale is at least calculable or was, until ten years ago,
when retailers demanded the privilege of returning unsold books, by
a system similar to magazine distribution. Considering that a "sale" is
not necessarily a sale, the degree to which publishers rely on the con-
signment of their products to establish their costs would frighten most
manufacturers. In fact, Gaynor has lately given up trying to play this
guessing game with retailers, and is now experimenting with the
scheme of sending them assortments of books, like variety cereal pack-
ages.

The advance sale has traditionally become important because of sea-
sonal marketing and crowding of books. Every P&F title released
through the trade appears on one of two lists a year. The fall list, aimed
at Christmas buying, begins with publishing dates in August and with
books already presented to jobbers and retailers in June. The spring list,
with publishing dates beginning in February, has already been pre-
sented to the trade in January. At Polk & Franklin semi-annual sales
meetings precede these July and January deadlines.

These sales meetings represent both cause and symptom of Polk &

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 61

Franklin's frantic seasonal preparations for merchandising books. On
these occasions the house calls in its travelers who sell to the retail
trade, for a two-day conference to acquaint them with the new list.
Polk & Franklin's travelers have always formed the infantry in its sales
campaigns. With their advance sales to retailers they consolidate the
publisher's trade advertising. But since their jobs largely depend on
their customers' confidence, the salesmen also represent the retailers
to the publisher. The traveler must be shrewd enough to know with-
out benefit of reading the nature of a given book, why it has been
published, and how the publisher plans to sell it.

The presentation aimed at answering these questions comes from the
editor. From the moment of the book's conception, it has been his job
to define its qualities and to translate them into selling terms. This
representation of a book usually requires a further translation into sales
quotas by P&F's sales manager. With thirty new books at every sales
meeting, time and attention are limited. Since an average presentation
lasts only eight minutes, the editor needs some shorthand method to
reduce the book to a negotiable status, so he expediently classifies it.

Classifying a new book according to its subject or its theme offers
the advantage of making its appeal measurable by the sales of past
books presumed to be more or less like it. But this is the only advantage.
To the degree that it succeeds in that compromise, classification moves
everyone's attention away from the book's individuality, away from
that quality which makes the book vital. Categorizing books contra-
dicts the industry's maxim that every book is an exception. An editor at
Polk & Franklin may spend months nurturing a book's peculiarity,
some precious eccentricity of its author, but at the sales meeting the
only way he can express its freshness and its difference is by homologiz-
ing it.

Tom Loesser always used to chafe at this need for classification. Any
worthwhile book, he would say, projects a personality, and should not
be tolled off as merely one of a category. While still a young man,
Loesser was privileged to know the late Maxwell Perkins and to share
some of the fascination and the pain of that editor's celebrated mis-
sion. Perkins had received an amorphous, much-rejected manuscript
fortuitously entitled "O Lost," and had made its author discipline it

62 The Denatured Novel

into Look Homeward, Angel. In the process of making his emotions
articulate in some more manageable form, Maxwell Perkins had pro-
jected the singularity of Thomas Wolfe.

Loesser always believed in the lesson he had learned from Max Per-
kins. The editor must represent the book at every stage of its produc-
tion: consultation, copy editing, manufacture, jacket design, advertis-
ing and selling. Yet, in the last analysis, he must amplify the author's
intentions in the most commercially feasible way. This contradiction
always disturbed Loesser. "Novelists don't write categories/' he would
say. "The question is not what is a pot boiler but who is a pot boiler. A
man writes as he is. If he has the soul of a pot boiler, he will write pot
boilers/'

When Loesser spoke like this he spoke like Henry James. But James
never sold many books. Anyway, book promotion has always worked
the other way around. A publisher will emphasize a book's similarity to
others so that he can then show how it exceeds these others in the
qua^ties they presumably share. Sooner or later the salesman must sell
the book, having judged it on his own terms. His terms are the sales
of previous books like it.

Loesser's notes for Polk & Franklin's sales meeting in the winter of
1950 yielded 0^11 this point. He later said they had made him retch, and
Gaynor haci^agreed. After a typed synopsis of Red Beach Assault,
Loesser penciled these notes:

1. As you can see, novel concerns Italian campaign in World War II.

2. Has a love story, like A Farewell to Arms, only it takes place in
Sicily.

3. Soldier-hero is not running away. It is more positive. He goes off
to the enemy like the last episode of The Gallery.

4. A landing at Anzio and suspense of a limited, bitter campaign
like A Walk in the Sun.

5. Soldier has no idea where he l*ts into the sense of what is going
on around him, like The Red Badge of Courage.

6. Promotion : we will give this shock advertising, like The Naked
and the Dead.

7. But our pitch is that it is first and foremost a quality novel.

8. Will be a paperback edition.

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 63

9. Movie rights have already been sold, possible tie-in with Holly-
wood's advertising. We think can get a Life article on World War
II films and how this one will be different.

Shot-gun salesmanship also marked the presentation of They Bank
on Me. Gaynor remembered thinking that this young editor had
learned fast.

You remember impact of Country Lawyer and Country Doctor.
WARM books!! This banker has watched over his town in the same
way, and taken care of its people for fifty years.

This book will break down image of a bank as a big, impersonal in-
stitution. Banker has his own personal problems, like Charles Gray in
Point of No Return.

But in this new book, appeal of the man in the bank is really more
like David Harum. A kind but shrewd honesty. WARM-HEARTED!!

National Usury Association is behind us on this one. Its journal for
July will lead off with a review of the book. And we will advertise in
Wall Street Journal.

One other important tie-in: the Southern crisis. This bank is in a
Southern town and the big episode (synopsis) is about the banker try-
ing to help the school principal get money for a new building for an
integrated school.

We plan to advertise this book as controversial in the South. This
will go big in East, West, and Northern markets.

The rape and the lynching speak for themselves.

Author is already signed up for a series of appearances on college
campuses. The liberal angle. Publicity Department is already working
on the endorsements.

So the books went to market. Both justified the original estimates,
but with unexpected consequences. Considered an investment in its
author, Red Beach Assault performed as intended. Polk & Franklin
sold out the original edition within a year, although scarcely recovering
costs because of the increased advertising budget. The advance sale to
the trade, 4,300 copies, proved slightly less than the estimate. Never-
theless, P&F followed up a half-page ad in Publishers' Weekly with a
series of smaller ads before and after publication in the New York
Times and Herald Tribune book reviews and in the more literate maga-

64 The Denatured Novel

zines with a small but national distribution. It was also listed in several
of P&F's other ads in these same publications.

When the paperbound edition of the novel, retitled Beachhead in
Hell, appeared a year after publication, the sales of the hard-cover edi-
tion stood at 7,300 copies. Its trade sales stopped at that point, but the
paperback went well. Monster Books sold 200,000 copies in the first
printing; another 650,000 copies in 1951 tied in with the movie. But
no one had made any money except the author. By June of 1952 the
reprint sales had barely repaid Monster Books for its $12,000 advance
against royalties. All the milkmaids had done their job, but there was
not enough milk to go around.

Well reviewed and carefully published, the war novel was a succes
d'estime, a fact which curiously nullified P&F's investment. All had
gone according to plan, but the author did not see it this way. He
attributed the difference between the favorable reviews and the small
sales to the lack of advertising. P&F's capital risk and its negotiations
with the subsidiary marketers which had enabled the publication in the
first place made no impression on him. Then, on the strength of this
novel another publisher offered the author a ridiculously large advance
for a volume of his short stories, and he immediately challenged P&F
with the offer. This was an outright trespass. Everyone knew it, includ-
ing the agent who had promoted it.

Tasker reminded everyone that this was exactly the sort of raid P&F
pulled off whenever it could. Nevertheless, Polk & Franklin was on the
spot. The other publisher obviously planned to steal the author by pub-
lishing the short stories at a loss. Expensive luxuries, short-story vol-
umes yield only small sales (2,000 copies in this case would be good) .
Having published this author's works with as yet no profit, Loesser
urged him to continue work on his third novel, even offered him a
$1,000 advance; but P&F "regretfully" turned down the short stories.
The refusal to lose more money finally cost the house the author in
whom it had invested.

They Bank on Me brought surprises too. Advance sales had totaled
10,000 copies, slightly higher than expected, Fortunately a trucker's
strike had prevented P&F from supplying the printer with enough
paper for the first run, and so a second printing before publication had

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 65

been necessary. Then came the break which made the book. A large
manufacturing company ordered 7,000 copies at a jobber's discount
to be delivered in time for distribution as a Christmas bonus for its
employees. This company's president, like the banker a self-made man,
had noted the strong preachments in the book about the beauties of
living happily with less money, and desired to bestow this comfort on
his employees.

Timing was perfect. Polk & Franklin printed the copies and immedi-
ately took full-page newspaper ads to announce the third printing
within a week after publication. The book, in fact, did sell the 7,200
copies within the first month; and, still on the strength of its Christ-
mas-bonus order, Polk & Franklin gambled on another printing ahead
of sales and another series of ads proudly announcing "Four Big Print-
ings in Five Weeks/' The lure worked. The book began to sell. Enough
retailers who had overstocked it reported the book a best seller to give
it a place on two best-seller lists. Cleavage Press offered P&F $25,000
for reprint rights. The book sold steadily in the trade edition, and with
the help of Christmas buying P&F got rid of 35,000 copies. The re-
maining books became selections in the Franklin Library.

Ill
THE REVOLUTION

Polk & Franklin published these two books at a time of rapid changes
in book markets, when it was becoming evident that trade publishers
had no business publishing fiction. For one thing, over-production had
returned with the peace-time economy. During World War II, when
the rationing of metal and paper had severely limited the manufacture
of books, publishers had enjoyed a seller's market; any book would sell.
During the war years the industry had produced an annual average of
7,800 trade titles. In 1947 the total jumped to nearly 9,200, then to
1 1,000 by 1950. But customers for these books had failed to materialize.

A more specific change had drastically affected the sale of fiction.
This was the tremendous increase in the number of inexpensive paper-

66 The Denatured Novel

bound reprints. The adjusted Census of Manufacturers indicated a
sale of 95,500,000 paperbacks in 1947, sightly less than a fifth of all
books published in the United States. By 1952 sales had risen to 270,-
000,000 copies, more than a third of the annual total production. And
between these years fiction comprised nearly ninety per cent of the
paperback titles. Clearly, more book buyers wanted their novels in
paperback.

Simultaneously during the early post-war years manufacturing con-
ditions all but prohibited the profitable publication of novels in trade
editions. Before the War, as late as 1941, a trade publisher could break
even on the sale of 2,500 copies of a novel, and since fiction had always
been his most speculative product he could afford to publish many
titles each season in hopes of one sales winner. But the scarcity of paper
persisted for several years after the war. Book publishers could not
compete with the magazines, which were able to buy paper in large
quantities, or with newspaper syndicates able to purchase mills and
contract for their entire output in pulp.

The rising cost of labor also worked against small editions. Make-
ready time on short printing runs became too expensive, so book manu-
facturers gave priority to large editions. Delays were costly to the pub-
lishers. In the early post-war years all costs had increased at Polk &
Franklin, but the firm clamped down where it could on the cost of
advertising and the cost of royalties. As a consequence of these econo-
mies, in the case of the war novel at least, Polk & Franklin lost an
author.

Rising costs and changing readership had determined most of the
editorial decisions at P&F in the publication of these two books; and
their respective sales helped cause a palace revolution in the firm. As
an investment the Red Beach Assault had failed; the departure of its
author nullified much of the prestige its publication had brought to
the house. But, as a one-shot, the autobiography had succeeded. With
better luck than the novel and with shrewd merchandising this piece
of editorial carpentry had paid off, earning the house almost $85,000
from trade sales and another $12,500 in reprint royalties. Because all
books tend to attract others like them to a publisher's list, P&F could
expect more of each kind. Some policy had to be set.

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 67

Everyone at Polk & Franklin recognized these books as belonging to
different breeds, but neither book was an extremity of its kind. The
novel was promising but not first-rate. The autobiography was mer-
chandise but not worthless. Tom Loesser justified publishing both.
"We want a varied list," he said, "the best of all kinds of books." He
argued that this was the only sound compromise a publisher interested
in quality could make. Since a book's sales did not correspond to the
book's quality in this imperfect world, then competent merchandise
would have to pay the way for good literature.

Some of the facts have justified Loesser's argument. For better or
worse, a publisher's bookkeeping characteristically charges all the cost
of a book against the trade sales of its first edition, making it look like
a poor investment. Any income the book earns from a magazine, a re-
print, a book-club selection or a film is entered in a separate account for
"subsidiary" income. The income in this second account the publisher
considers as profit, overlooking the fact that his original investment
(his trade edition) helped earn this subsidiary income and therefore
merits credit for a share of it.

This arbitrary partition between ledger pages often determines edi-
torial decisions. According to Loesser's thinking, one book had to sup-
port another. This was the way the publisher could justify "the worth-
while book of limited appeal." But Gaynor saw it differently. The only
way to justify a loss was to blame the editor, and axe him. The guillo-
tine always works.

Loesser had patiently tried to argue his compromise by analogy. "The
auto manufacturer doesn't expect the same dollar-return from the
carbureior and the clutch plate and the hub cap. He sells a composite.
Each of the parts costs him more or less than average, yet the whole
product needs all its parts."

For awhile Gaynor argued with him. "According to your analogy, the
manufacturer could afford a better clutch plate by making a cheaper
carburetor. But you don't want to admit it, because if you did, then
you couldn't rationalize publishing junk."

The times favored Gaynor. P&F steadily lost money after 1948, and
the sons and daughters and the new in-laws of the Polk family
finally persuaded the president to step aside. Upon the retirement of

68 The Denatured Novel

Horace Polk, Jr., to a newly created chairmanship of the board, in
January 1950, Lewis Gaynor was appointed president of Polk & Frank-
lin. Within a month the business manager became vice-president, and
the advertising manager took over the sales department. Two of the
five trade editors were fired, and replaced by younger men from the
production department. Loesser was persuaded to head Polk & Frank-
lin's new textbook department; and his successor, with a title of execu-
tive editor, was hired from Monster Books.

The consequences of this palace revolution presently appeared. A
series of memoranda from the president to all department heads firmly
defined a new editorial policy for the trade department. "We believe
in making substantial profits on books of which we can be proud," the
first memo began, "but we are not content with marginal profits/'
Simply stated, the intent staggered Loesser: every book must make a
substantial profit. "To guide your thinking along these lines," the
memo continued, "we will aim at a total minimum sale of $25,000 net
for each title over a reasonable period of time." The memo suggested
three years as "reasonable."

This was sound policy. A book's pricing formula would depend not
on the number of sales needed to break even but on a stipulated rev-
enue to be earned by any means whatever. A book priced at $3.50 and
returning $2.00 net to the publisher would have to sell 12,500 copies
in order to meet its obligation to the firm; or for every thousand sales
less than its quota it would have to earn for the publisher $2,000 of
subsidiary income. This policy would eliminate the marginal book. Al-
though the president did not bother to explain it, this policy would
censor future lists at Polk & Franklin before they could even be as-
sembled. This censorship would take its heaviest toll among novels.

The effective book selling period of novels (from three to five
months) is shorter than for other books. Novels would, therefore, have
less time in the market to achieve the stipulated minimum sale. Unless
its author's name had sales appeal, or unless it could provide enough
subsidiary income 'to make up the difference between its actual sales
and its quota, a novel henceforth would have small chance of accept-
ance at Polk & Franklin.

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 69

Subsequent memoranda elaborated this policy. One of them, en-
titled "Our Biggest Liability," explained why the expense of marginal
books exceeded even their estimated costs. "The book with the limited
market will usually be over-printed to meet our pricing formula, over-
advertised because it is over-printed, and over-sold in terms of its true
market. Unsold copies returned to us for credit cause a loss in every
department that must touch the book." Another memo, entitled "Con-
servative Terms," informed the editors that advances and high royal-
ties to authors were no longer automatic. "Polk & Franklin," it said,
"is not a charitable institution."

In view of these changes, Thomas Loesser's final transaction in the
trade department caused him unusual distress. Before the revolution
he had received the manuscript of a Western novel. It was about a
rancher but offbeat, what the trade would call a "serious" cowboy story.
It was a character-study of a man who turned out to be his own worst
enemy. Loesser had originally liked the outline and had invited the
author to sublnit more copy. Now, the first five chapters and a precis of
the rest looked promising. The story began conventionally with a stam-
pede and a narrow escape and even ended in a chase, but with a differ-
ence. It all occurred in the man's mind; and Loesser recognized the
quality by which the trade would label this novel as "serious." The
story concerned less the events than the perception of these events; it
was cerebral.

It was a splendid book and worth publishing, but Loesser knew it
would never make its quota under the new system without the aid of
subsidiary income. Since its marketing category disqualified it as a
Western no reprinter would even consider it until he could see a com-
pleted manuscript. Meanwhile, the author had run out of money and
needed an advance in order to finish the book.

But the change in command intervened. When the new executive
editor was briefed on these data, he did not need to read the manu-
script. He dictated a letter of regret to the author, censuring "the
novel's aesthetic failing." He faintly applauded "the descriptive qual-
ity," but pointed out that "in the last analysis the characters are not
quite believable in this context."

jo The Denatured Novel

IV
THE INSULAR INDUSTRY

Loesser was not the only lonely man at Polk & Franklin. Its new
president had distresses of his own. Lewis Gaynor had put his house in
order only by exchanging compromises, but he felt he had to curb
over-production too many copies of too many titles which (except
for the war years) had plagued the firm as long as he could remember.
Horace Folk's impeccable logic had taught him the consequences of
over-production; and he had reduced the arithmetic of publishing to
what he called Folk's Law: "Thou shalt not oversell."

Gaynor still recalls those two books Polk & Franklin published
while he was sales manager: the war novel and the autobiography.
Probably neither one should have been published, although for differ-
ent reasons. The house had published one for its literary merit and the
other for profit, but neither had profited Polk & Franklin's list. The
novel had cost the house an author, and the autobiography had cer-
tainly not attracted any worthwhile manuscripts.

Gaynor recalls these events as he prepares his lecture on the sad state
of the publishing industry. One trouble, he has decided, is that most
publishers know so little about their own business that they have to
pretend to be intuitive. For years the trade has ignored the statistics of
its own operations. Nor can a publisher readily find out what he needs
to know. The trade's partial and private bookkeeping denies the discov-
ery of even fundamental statistical knowledge.

Separately recorded as they are, even the two most elementary facts
about the industry the number of titles annually published and the
number of copies sold are mutually irrelevant. The annual inventory
of new titles in Publishers' Weekly and the periodic tabulation of
sales in the United States Census of Manufactures classify informa-
tion according to different subject headings. The integration of text-
book, trade and mail-order publishing within a single publishing house
has compounded this problem of finding relevant statistics.

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 71

These are only symptoms of the real problem, Gaynor concedes
which is the trade's ignorance of book readers in this country. The pub-
lisher might make an educated guess about the number or geographical
location of book buyers for any given title. But about readers, he knows
almost nothing. For years he has ducked the responsibility of finding
out.

Gaynor lays no claim to scholarship, but he does have a historical
sense; and his marginal notes in Cheney's Survey of the Book Industry,
in a chapter called ''Readers or Book Buyers," indicate that he has
found the problem. "We are beginning to realize that the processes of
the book industry do not form a straight line from author to reader,"
Cheney states. "They form a sort of continuous circle within a circle in
which the reader does (or rather, should) influence every branch of the
industry, including even the author and the critic."

The industry has been so concerned with the book that it has forgotten
the reader. But the influence of the reader on the book must sooner or
later be understood by the publisher and bookseller and the result
must inevitably affect the nature of books published, their format and

their price, their theme and style and, it is hoped, merchandising

methods.

Gaynor has underlined it. "The industry has been so concerned with
the book that it has forgotten the reader!'

The inevitable guesswork by which publishers build their lists
Cheney facetiously calls the "spawning theory of publishing," in a
chapter called "The Book, the Buyer and the Critic." The whole busi-
ness is based on guesswork. "The good publisher is the one who guesses
wrong least."

Logically, therefore, it appears to be the duty of the publisher to guess
as often as possible the longer the lists, the more the good guesses.
The spawning theory of publishing cannot, if it carries its logic to a
conclusion, reject any manuscript which contains even traces of merit
or theoretical sales possibilities it might turn out to be a good seller.

j2 The Denatured Novel

Cheney explains the relationship between too many books and their
short life in the market place. The excessive lists of titles seasonably
issued mean that each book gets inadequate promotion and selling
time. "Books are cannibals," the Survey states, "and the competition
between books is a contributing cause to every major problem of the
industry." Crowding too many titles into short periods of market time
taxes the bookseller's capital and his display space. It also taxes the
care and attention of everyone who touches the book publisher, job-
ber, retailer, and book reviewer necessarily causing the neglect of
some titles in favor of others. "Of the total number of trade books
available," says Cheney, "not sixty per cent receive even fair merchan-
dising attention." The ideal remedy would be to publish fewer titles.
But who would know which titles to cut out?

That is why the vision of the publishers sitting around a table and de-
ciding to cut down their lists is almost equal, in stirring the hollow
laugh, to a disarmament conference. But the picture is lugubrious
compared with the one of each publisher, surrounded by his staff, doing
the actual cutting down.

Despite seventy years of marketing, book publishing is still an insu-
lar industry. The argument of Gaynor's lecture is simple. The eco-
nomic organization of the American book trade, still patterned on its
nineteenth-century origins, includes hundreds of small business units,
each handling many (and many of the same) products in limited quan-
tities. The sale of these books (and often the books themselves) de-
pends on the variable desires and predilections or the "taste" of
thousands of groups of people; but none of these business entities has
ever had the means to afford a thorough and systematic exploration of
book markets. Anyway, nobody has ever analyzed public taste, except in
retrospect.

Unable to find or to create any useful opinion-makers among the
nation's book buyers, these individual enterprises have consequently
looked to one another to define taste. By a process of trial and error,
the publisher produces as many books as possible, testing the appeal

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 73

of his products to other business entities within the trade, even as they
pass these products along to the ultimate buyers. The rising costs of
operating a business, and the high price of experimenting, have rein-
forced this tendency to look within the trade for means of measuring
the appeal of books.

Gaynor's forthcoming lecture is all about this inversion of the book
trade, and he illustrates his argument by describing three conditions :
the plight of the retail bookseller, the ridiculousness of the publisher's
advertising, and the problem of book-club distribution. Gaynor's argu-
ment is so impressive and so discouraging that he himself sees more
frightening implications than he expected.

Retail bookselling, Gaynor's lecture points out, offers as timely a
subject now as it did in 1872, when Frederick Leypoldt founded Pub-
lishers' Weekly. In that year the United States, with a population of
40,000 people, had about 3,000 book stores. Today, with a national
population more than four times larger, there are fewer than 3,000
retail book stores in the United States.

Even this startling comparison falls short of the facts. Polk & Frank-
lin's mailing list, for instance, includes only 2,100 stores whose gross
receipts come primarily from books; and only twelve per cent of the
names on P&F's list stores located in New York City, Philadelphia,
New England, Chicago, St. Louis and scattered West Coast cities
stock more than 2,000 current titles. (Gaynor does not express his pri-
vate opinion that P&F cannot rely on any more than fifty of these stores
for aggressive and intelligent marketing of current and backlist books.)

Although the reprint publishers have discovered 100,000 new outlets,
including cigar stores, bus terminals and supermarkets, most retail sell-
ing of original hard-cover books is confined to a very few bookstores.
The plight of the rest of the average booksellers has its effect on the
entire trade. Gaynor emphasizes this with some of Jacques Barzun's
observations in The New Leader (May 13, 1957), about the bookstore
as a bottleneck "a plugged-up medicine dropper."

The bookseller is caught between the rent of his poky shop, the high
cost of shipping and accounting, and the vagueness of the public mind
the mind which would forget the name Lucky Strike in a week if

74 The Denatured Novel

unprqmpted by ads. In this literal and figurative box, a bookseller
would be a fool to stock anything but best-sellers and college diction-
aires. Which means that the trade's effort at marketing concentrates
on persuading him that some new work will be a best-seller,

Surely, the bookseller offers no vital communication between the
publisher and the public he seeks. Readers dependent on the retail
trade often never see or hear of books they might otherwise buy, yet
the myth of "the infallible advance sale" persists. His sales are negli-
gible, yet his store has traditionally played a crucial part in the pub-
lisher's planning. As an outlet for advance sales, it has long been a
kind of laboratory for a book's dry-run. The transactions between pub-
lishers' salesmen and the booksellers they visit have usually determined
how and to what extent the publisher will advertise his book. To the
extent that publishers have heeded the advance sale, they have acceded
to the judgment of their salesmen and the booksellers.

As further evidence of the trade's inversion Gaynor cites its methods
of advertising, which he compares with other industries. In the national
economy advertising has become the primary selling tool, the means
of creating desires in order to sell products to satisfy them. The pur-
pose of book advertising, accordingly, would seem to be increased sales,
but publishers advertise only deviously toward this end. To be sure,
every publisher goes through the motions of advertising books to con-
sumers, but most of the media cannot reach his markets for prices the
publisher can afford.

Publishers buy no time on television or radio. They buy space in less
than one per cent of the nation's 1,750 daily newspapers, in about five
per cent of the nation's six hundred consumer magazines and in all
trade and general book-review journals. But the rising cost of adver-
tising space, beyond the increase in book prices, has reduced even this
pitiful effort. (Gaynor remembers a memo he sent to Loesser about
Red Beach Assault- "We can nicely afford a one-inch ad stating 'Com-
pliments of a Friend/") And what the publisher cannot afford he
tries to get for nothing through the efforts of his publicity department.

Instead of telling more people about his books, the publisher in-
vests in brand advertising of the most inverted sort. He has decided

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 75

he can sell more books by advertising himself to the trade. He tries to
create an image of his list to authors and their agents, to the editors
of book reviews, to book clubs, to the story departments of motion pic-
ture studios and to other publishers, in order to convince them of his
strength and of the sales appeal of the books he sponsors. This, says
Gaynor, is the tip-off. His customers are not readers. They are the
authors of new manuscripts and the marketers who will sell the books
he makes of them. In this sense his advertising moves in a closed sys-
tem. It is meant first for the trade, which provides and buys titles, then
for the consumers who buy books and other furniture, but only cas-
ually for readers.

There are some other consequences of this tight little book world.
Advertising agencies assign and prepare most of this advertising. But
of twenty-seven New York advertising agencies specializing in books,
six or eight handle most of the publishers' accounts, a few of them rep-
resenting at one time as many as twenty different publishers. In any
other business this friendly little custom would constitute malpractice,
particularly, as in the book trade, if all the agent's accounts wanted to
create the same public image.

Even when all the products are supposedly different one of the
book trade's half-truths the agent must represent each book on its
own terms, yet suggest its relevance to the common image of strength,
integrity, discriminating taste and sales appeal which every sponsor
happens to want for his own. It is rather like playing all the hands in
a poker game and playing them all to win. Were advertising books
merely a matter of buying space and writing copy, the agency would
never earn its fees. But because books belong to publishers' lists, and
because building the list and advertising it usually go together, the
agency often consults on editorial matters.

Such consultation occurs in those seasons of doubt prior to the pub-
lisher's semi-annual sales meetings when, for any of a dozen vexing
reasons, the list is not "complete." An author has not finished a manu-
script, the possibility of libel has temporarily delayed a book, the dis-
covery of new material necessitates the revision of another, or a novel
in galley form may suddenly reveal everything wrong with its story.
But the publisher must "fill" his list. "Filling" the list is poor publish-

j6 The Denatured Novel

ing. It ignores the quality of an individual book, but it constantly
tempts every publisher.

Remembering his fixed overhead and the uncertain market, he be-
lieves he must produce even over-produce to compensate for the
books now scratched from his list. He recalls rejected manuscripts from
literary agents, detours a title or two from the mail-order department,
and hurriedly hunts for a juvenile or even a technical book to "balance"
the list. Without time to establish an advance sale he scarcely knows
these new books, yet he must advertise them. The publisher obviously
needs some coordination between list-planning and advertising, so he
deputizes his advertising agent.

Chances are, the agent can estimate more accurately than his client
any new book's possibilities. Without the pressure of sales quotas he
can judge a book more effectively on its own terms. In this seasonal
breach of publishing routine the advertising agent becomes more than
ever a taste-maker. Even more directly than the publisher's salesmen
or the bookseller, he shares the editorial responsibility.

Direct-by-mail advertising is a more reliable means of communicat-
ing with the book buyer because it aims at sales rather than customers.
Although the results are limited, they are immediate. The responses
from a selected mailing list to the announcement of a prospective book
are so reliable that the publisher can accurately forecast its sale. By
split-run advertising mailing different announcements of the same
book he can even learn how to increase sales by varying that book.
(Gaynor might have added that Polk & Franklin often builds a book to
order in this fashion, starting with nothing but a title, a description and
a mailing list. But this is beside the point Gaynor means to make.)

Selling books by mail, in the form of the book club, has revolution-
ized trade-book marketing. But Gaynor calls this merely one more
symptom of the trade's inability to communicate with readers. The
book club sells a contract which obligates a purchaser to buy books in
return for a bargain. The book which a club sells is usually a simul-
taneous reprint of a trade edition. The large club rents plates from the
publisher, manufactures its own books, and pays royalties jointly to
author and publisher. Its prime costs are less than the publisher's. Plate
rental eliminates most of the expense of composition, and the large dis-

The Clay Feet of Polk & Franklin 77

tribution a club can guarantee reduces printing and binding costs.

The American archetype of this business, the Book-of-the-Month
Club, has exploited these factors since its founding in 1926. During its
first year, even without dividends and with readers paying postage,
this club managed to distribute over 230,000 books to nearly 4,700
buyers. The membership reached 110,000 by 1929 but shrank with the
Depression, so the Club inaugurated the book-dividend system in 1931.
In its twentieth anniversary year the Book-of-the-Month Club dis-
tributed more than 11,000,000 books to about 900,000 members.

On this pattern, many hundreds of book clubs have been founded
with nothing but small capital (or credit) and a mailing list. Many
have gone bankrupt or been absorbed by others, and new ones con-
tinually appear. Among the giants in the field by 1950, the Book-of-
the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, and a third, the Dollar Book
Club, accounted for eighty per cent of all current book club sales. The
book clubs are the publishers' best customers. They pay more than half
of all trade publishers' subsidiary income. Their advertising increases
the trade sales of books by as much as ten to fifty times.

The effect of book clubs upon publishiruj has caused a lengthy and
unresolved debate. By selling large quantitiefc x of relatively few current
titles they have exploited best-sellerism; they have made a few authors
rich, but they have jeopardized the retail booksellers in sum, trade
publishing as now practiced could not exist without them. But one of
their characteristics, says Gaynor, has been too long overlooked. Not-
withstanding their enormous sales even because of them the book
clubs have made even more distinct the difference between the book
buyer and the reader.

Gaynor refers to the transaction between the club and its members.
The critical, unpublicized fact of all these clubs is the tremendous
turnover in membership they have had to sustain. About forty per cent
of the Literary Guild's membership accepts the Guild's monthly selec-
tions. Offering a more varied selection, the Book-of-the-Month Club
manages to sell books to a monthly average of only about twenty-five
per cent of its members, and half of its membership changes every year.
The significance of this high mortality rate, Gaynor believes, is re-
vealed in book-club advertising.

78 The Denatured Novel

The clubs advertise a bargain: books at less than retail price plus
free book-dividends. The Book-of-the-Month Club spends millions of
dollars each year on membership campaigns merely to maintain its
status quo. But neither the cancellations of membership nor the pur-
chases of books in the first place have much to do with reading.

People will accept almost anything free, even books, Some will con-
tinue to buy book bargains until their shelves are full; others women
mostly even intend to read them. But with astonishing regularity new
books arrive, adding to the pile of homework. The self-improvement
campaign which once looked so promising begins to pall; with guilt
and annoyance the purchaser cancels her subscription. What happens,
Gaynor explains, is that book clubs continually oversell their selec-
tions, offering give-away books to people who would not normally read
them or even buy them. In so doing the clubs contradict the first com-
mandment of the trade: "Thou shalt not oversell."

Changes in book-club memberships within the past ten years have
borne this out. By 1950 the Book-of-the-Month Club had lost nearly
half the number of subscribers it had four years earlier. Also in 1950
the Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club began with 200,000 mem-
bers; it now has nearly 2,000,000. Gaynor pauses over this comparison.
The Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club, as its name implies, sells a
different product.

Ironically for the trade publisher the demand for condensation of
original works appears to be based soundly on readers' habits and de-
sires. This is far more secure than the appeal of the give-away clubs. Its
success poses some sobering questions about reading in the United
States, a subject which suggests exploration if book publishing is to
thrive.

The condensed book club offers a better bargain than any other in its
promise of entertainment with less effort. It. sells books that have been
pre-read, with the difficulties of reading thoughtfully removed a mas-
ticated product that is the closest correlation yet discovered between
book publishing and American readership. Perhaps the perfect books
for this democratic literacy will turn out to be only Tables of Contents.

Gaynor's lecture stops short of asserting the reason for this. By over-
producing books which are subject to the discrimination of book mar-

The Clay Feet of Polk 6 Franklin 79

keters the trade publisher has lost control of the whole operation. He
has lost control to his customers, and these customers are not readers
or even book buyers. They are the book marketers.

V
MASS LITERACY

In the light of the trade's colossal disregard of the Cheney Survey,
Gaynor can expect no more than a polite acknowledgment of his lec-
ture. Publishers' Weekly will applaud him in an editorial statement.
But even Polk & Franklin will continue its publication of trade titles
for subsidiary markets, its investment in a larger textbook department,
and its production of manuals of this-and-that for direct-mail customers
(in spite of the fact that Gaynor would rather publish any competent
novel than the "Song of Solomon" profusely illustrated).

Basically a distributor of books, the marketer originally had no edi-
torial function. But the markets for fiction have changed in the twen-
tieth century and grown far beyond the bookstore clientele. Marketers
have persuaded the trade publisher to change his wares. Gaynor's tact-
ful omission about book clubs comes close to the point. There may in
fact be no editorial collusion prior to a club's purchase of a book, but
there need be none, so long as the publisher remains aware of the kind
of purchases a club has previously made. "Completing" the list is often
the trade's euphemism for loading it with candidates for subsidiary
markets.

The so-called subsidiary markets now support the trade publisher.
By a slip of the bookkeeper's pen "subsidiary" has become "subsidy."
Ever since the iSgo's, trade publishing has been continuously involved
with one or several of them; not groups of individual purchasers, but
other media which use fiction. The earliest of these markets were the
magazines which existed to carry advertising to national circulations.
Then the movies effectively influenced the book trade after the U. S.
Supreme Court decreed copyright protection to authors and publishers
for filmed adaptations of their books. Most recently the inexpensive
paperbacks have revolutionized the sale of fiction.

80 The Denatured Novel

Gaynor's lecture set out to illustrate the book trade's concentric in-
fluence, but it concludes in dismay over the success of appealing to
readers who don't want to bother with the effort of reading. Having
worked it through, Gaynor now reads his own message with awe. Surely
the problem has outgrown Polk & Franklin. Some supra-agency must
take over. Gaynor has just decided to do what you might have expected.
He has enclosed a pre-print of his lecture in a long letter addressed to a
large philanthropic foundation (the Maxwell-Essex Fund) requesting
several million dollars for the book trade to study the acute problems of
mass literacy.

Chapter IV

Slick Nirvana

POPULAR fiction has always assured the reader about himself and his
possibilities that humanity is naturally good, that the individual
counts for something, that he can improve and that material success
has Divine benediction. When the novel is on the right track with
these ideas it can show all the world's wickedness with impunity. In-
deed, the assurance of better things to come does not have to be in-
sistent. So long as it is there at all, the reader will magnify it as needed,
while enjoying the trials and crises of righteousness.

Fiction that makes a policy of this particular life-assurance will al-
ways find readers, so long as it can be distributed to them, which is why
the commercial magazines have had so much to do with the develop-
ment of the American novel. By a plurality of hundreds of millions of
readers, Americans have read more fiction in magazines than in books.

Particularly since the iSgo's, magazines have financially supported
most American writers. That eminent magazinist, William Dean
Howells, spoke confidently of this fact in October 1893, in his epochal
essay 'The Man of Letters as a Man of Business." As he told the readers
of Scribner's Magazine, "story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade,
and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world."
Authors could now live, he said, "and live prettily enough, by the sale of
the serial publication of their writings to the magazines."

Howells included more than just the few or famous writers: "a much
larger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the edi-
tors, and who may never make themselves public, but who do well at a

81

8z The Denatured Novel

kind of acceptable work." In fact, Howells announced, "the prosperity
of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class,
was wholly unknown among us before the Civil War."

Howells was talking about the cumulative effect of many changes.
Although installment publishing had occasionally occurred since the
eighteenth century, it became popular when Harper's New Monthly
Magazine made it a policy after 1850. The editor of this same maga-
zine, and a novelist himself, Howells could talk with authority about
installment fiction. What made his statement newsworthy was the
tremendous growth of the popular magazines after the i88o's, both in
numbers and in circulation.

The growth of the magazines coincided with the book trade's organ-
ized promotion of literature which followed the new Copyright Act of
1891. In fact, the Federal Government had already (incidentally but
immeasurably) assisted popular literature by subsidizing the maga-
zines. An Act of Congress in 1879 which reclassified the mails desig-
nated magazines as second-class matter, subject to the privilege of a
new and lower mailing rate. When the native market for fiction began
to develop, therefore, the magazines were the chief means of reaching
it.

In A History of American Magazines: 1885-1905 (1957) Frank
Luther Mott estimated that the number of magazines in the United
States increased from 3,500 to 6,000 during the twenty-year period of
his study, and that some 7,500 new magazines had been started. There
was more to what he called the "Magazine Revolution" than simply
growth in numbers. The invention of the halftone process, of adapting
the photograph to an engraved printing plate, made lavish illustration
commercially possible. This changed the appearance and the entire
nature of magazines.

The new ten-cent magazines in the iSgo's were handsomely illus-
trated and printed on slick (coated) paper devised for photo-engrav-
ing. Their prosperous appearance amplified their contents. They were
timely, favoring contemporary subjects, in fiction and in factual ar-
ticles, for the entire family. They offered entertainment, education,
romance and vicarious excitement to as large a public as possible. They
were popular in every sense of the word.

Slick Nirvana 83

Subsidized by low mailing rates, the publisher could afford to build
the circulation of his magazine. If he could guarantee a large subscrip-
tion list, he had something far more valuable than the income from his
subscribers. He had a possible market for anyone with a product to
sell. So he became a broker in names, a dealer in consumers, to whom
manufacturers for a price could advertise their products.

Finley Peter Dunne's spokesman, Mr. Dooley, once commented on
the magazines 7 economic incentive. In American Magazine (October
1909) he found fault. There were not enough ads to suit him: "What
I object to is whin I pay ten or fifteen cents f r a magazine expectin'
to spind me avenin' improvin' me mind -with th' latest thoughts in
advertisin' to find more thin a quarther of th' whole book devoted to
lithrachoor." Some publisher, he hoped, would be bold enough to
devote his magazine entirely to advertising. Since Dunne was both a
magazine writer and an editor, his Mr. Dooley carried some weight
with his opinion that "Lithrachoor an' business are hooked up to-
gether."

Advertising rates depend on the magazine's circulation, so the pub-
lisher wants to build and maintain as large a readership as possible. His
surest way is to capitalize on established interests among his readers.
The editorial content of his magazine is a means to this end utterly
functional.

There are many publics, which is to say many large groups of con-
sumers sharing common interests. Every magazine cultivates some such
group; ideally, it is a unique editorial package which consolidates and
encourages the habits of its readers. The literature which serves it must
remain dependably the same.

To insure his own stability the magazine publisher seeks a variety
of publics at the same time, but not for the same magazine. He pub-
lishes several at once. For many years the Curtis Publishing Company
issued three very different slicks: Ladies Home Journal (1883-) a
women's service magazine; Saturday Evening Post (1821-), a weekly
for the men of the family; and a farm magazine, Country Gentlemen
(191 1-1955). The Crowell Corporation (later Crowell-Collier) bought
and issued Womans Home Companion (1897-1957); Farm and Fire-
side (1906-1929), which became Country Home (1929-1939); and

84 The Denatured Novel

Collier's (1911-1957), a weekly family magazine to compete with
Curtis' Saturday Evening Post. The Hearst publishing enterprise
moved into the magazine field with products similarly compart-
mented: two women's service magazines, Good Housekeeping (1885-)
and Pictorial Review (1899-1939), and two of more general interest:
Cosmopolitan (1886-) and Hearst's International (1901-1925), which
Cosmopolitan later absorbed.

In his attack on the vested interests in literature, Money Writes!
(1927), Upton Sinclair decided in a chapter called "Artificial Selec-
tion" that these chains were all "run exactly like the department
stores and shoe-factory chains, upon the same principles of standardi-
zation and mass production." But the size of a publisher's organization
is incidental to the compartmentalization of his products. He is a
specialist in audiences, because the advertisers must have an accurate
gauge of their markets. For instance, McCall's (1897-) and Redbook
(1903-) both published by McCall, go to two different groups of
women, differentiated by the amount of the husband's income. The
advertisements in McCall's, like those in Ladies Home Journal, appeal
to a higher standard of living and reading. Redbook 9 s competitor used
to be Crowell-Collier's American Magazine (1888-1956), but is now
Hearst's Cosmopolitan.

Nothing is left to chance. Conde Nast's House and Garden (1901-)
and Hearst's House Beautiful (1896-) competitively seek an audience
of similar interests but higher income than Nast's Better Homes
and Gardens (1924-). Similarly, Nast's Vogue (1892-) represents fash-
ions in women's wear differently than Nast's Glamour (1939-) or
Street and Smith's Mademoiselle (1935-). And Hearst's Harper's
Bazaar (1867-) goes to readers older and richer than readers of Seven-
teen ( 1944-) , published by this same house.

Aimed at a precise audience, the magazine must continue to gratify
it with the same fare. In token of the publishers' strenuous attempts
to stay'with the readers, most of the slicks have changed hands or been
absorbed by others. But it is striking that despite the high mortality of
the magazines themselves the literary product has remained constant.

The editorial content of some of the failures, for instance, is repre-
sentative of the entire slick field over the years, both in quality and in

Slick Nirvana 85

quantity. Woman's Home Companion (1873-1957), for instance, al-
ways offered a rich fare in fiction, and counted among its contributors
Mary E. Wilkins, Margaret Deland, Sherwood Anderson, Willa
Gather, Booth Tarkington, Pearl Buck, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis,
John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett. But the staple fare in each issue,
beginning in the 1920*5, was the serialized novel (usually two) by
women who could repeat their performances: Kathleen Norris, Edna
Ferber, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Faith Bald-
win and Taylor Caldwell.

Another magazine which failed, Pictorial Review (1899-1939),
offered comparable fiction by well-established authors: Edith Whar-
ton, Carl Sandburg, Joseph Conrad, Emil Ludwig, Booth Tarkington,
Gertrude Atherton; and characteristically the best of their writing. The
pages of Collier's (1911-1957) tell a similar story. This magazine
sought both British and American novelists, and built its circulation
on big names. The roll call of Collier's contributors from 1900 through
the 1930*5 correlates remarkably with the authors of best-selling novels.

The life of a slick magazine depends on its rapport with its readers,
which doubtless explains why these three magazines lasted as long as
they did. And maintaining rapport is a delicate business. Bernard De-
Voto, another eminent magazinist, described (in Saturday Review,
October 9, 1937) some of the demands of this readership. "People do
not read the slicks/' he said, "to encounter the brutalities, the pro-
fundities or the complexities of experience. They read to have their
ideas confirmed and their emotions ratified, to have their phantasy
life stimulated, and to increase their knowledge of the minor sanctions
and rituals of society but first of all they want to be amused."

No writer can escape the reader's influence even the established
and calculable writer. Temple Bailey's long and profitable career of
writing magazine serials ought to make her an expert on what she calls
"the idealistic presentation of young love"; yet she long ago developed
the habit of writing a serial concurrently with its publication so that
the readers' mail could help her determine the plot. For this agility,
even in the Depression years, McCalfs paid her $60,000 a serial.

The syndrome works both ways. The magazine also informs the
readers of their own habits and appetites. The editor is a taste-maker,

86 The Denatured Novel

defining and stimulating the habits, desires and impulses of his readers
simply by choosing and shaping what they read,

So the editor uses his prerogatives in telling authors what he wants.
Even Faith Baldwin insists on this. Contributing to a symposium
called The Writer s Book (1950), she says, "The writer has something
to sell; the editor something to buy. I doubt that it is ever a seller's
market in this field. The buyer is in the better position; and writers are
a dime a dozen/' Consequently, "An editor is prone even obliged
to tell writers what he believes they should write/'

Upton Sinclair put it differently in Money Writes! indicating
the magazines' "Artificial Selection" of their material. "They know
what they are going to want a year from now, and they order their
stories as they order their trainloads of paper from the mills; they even
order their writers; they will take a young genius and 'make' him, ex-
actly as Lasky or Paramount will turn a manicure girl with pretty pout-
ing lips into a world-famous 'star'."

A more patient explanation of the editor's collaboration with his
author is Elmer Davis' Bowker Lecture, "The Economics of Author-
ship" (1940). Davis wrote: "When a magazine editor has located
somebody who has that aptitude, and who can write well enough so
that his name has, or can acquire, a circulation value, he has a pearl of
great price; and he is going to feed that man ideas, when he no longer
has ideas of his own." This goes beyond merely priming the pump.
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote a serial a year for thirty-five
years, makes this clear. In the symposium called The Writer's Book
she says: "The story which the novelist intends primarily for serial sale
and its rewards is too often the child of the editor. The novelist only
has it committed to his care to bring up and develop."

The editor's aim and the reader's, although compatible, are not the
same. The fiction the editor prints serves the need of his sponsors, the
advertisers, to the extent that it must capture and hold as many readers
as possible. This is a restraining influence. The fiction may not offend
business in general or in particular, or American government of any
variety, or any religious, civic or military organization. The fiction may
not contradict the mores of the average consumer-reader without pun-
ishing the offender. These well-known prohibitions are similar to the

Slick Nirvana 87

ones levied on motion pictures; most of them also apply to the inex-
pensive paperback books. The prohibitions and the devious ways
around them belong not to art but to manufacture.

Slick magazine fiction must entertain several million readers with-
out offending them or straying beyond their interests. It must offer
the same fare over and over again without seeming to. These require-
ments prescribe the editorial content of every mass-circulation maga-
zine. The most familiar evidence of this requisite product and of its
effects on the economics of writing is undoubtedly the Saturday Even-
ing Post.

The Post contains more information about the national personality
than any other publication in the world. It is the slick by which all
others are measured. The slurs about its middle-brow superficiality, and
the response that most of the disparaging writers could not meet the
Post's standards of publication, are quite familiar. Charge and counter-
charge are grounded to the man who guided this magazine to its emi-
nence George Horace Lorimer, the Post's boss from 1899-1936.

Lorimer's first editorial page (September 30, 1899) declared the
Post's homage "to the great mass of intelligent people who make
homes and love them, who chose good lives and live them, who seek
friends and cherish them, who select the best recreations and enjoy
them." The incense is unmistakable. The sweet dream in which "the
great mass of intelligent people' 7 would share was already being fab-
ricated.

For nearly forty years the Post demonstrated what this patriarch
meant. He was a conservative and a nationalist. Like his readers he
believed in God, in love and marriage, in college educations, in success,
in the conservation of wild life and in the policy of American isolation.
He opposed the League of Nations and the New Deal; he fought for
restrictive immigration, for free enteqDrise in business, and for the
sanctity of the family. The Post amplified all of these convictions. The
magazine was an extension of the man.

Lorimer selected all of the material, wrote the editorials, selected
the cover and the story illustrations, even censored the ads. He kept
his fingers on his writers and on their pens. He frequently corre-
sponded with them and entertained them in order to check on the

88 The Denatured Novel

progress of their work. Emerson Hough referred to his novel, The
Covered Wagon (1922), as their "partnership book," in token of Lor-
imer's proposing it in the first place, helping him to plan it, and con-
sulting in the revision. Occasionally Lorimer even ghosted. When
David Graham Phillips was murdered, his unfinished serial, "Grains
of Sand" ( 191 1 ), was running in the Post; Lorimer finished the manu-
script.

Lorimer paid his authors handsomely, and set the rates for all other
slicks to beat; but paternalism went with the pay. He would not bar-
gain over manuscripts or offer contracts, but after an author had pub-
lished in the Post, Lorimer took his loyalty for granted and assumed
that the Post would have first refusal on the next story/Leaving the
Post for another magazine as Irvin S. Cobb did, and Jack London,
Ring Lardner and Peter B. Kyne Lorimer considered a breach of
friendship. Such paternalism, along with Lorimer's shrewd sense of
fiction and vigorous scouting, secured an imposing list of contributors.

Some of these might surprise you: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris,
Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell, Edith Wharton, Willa
Gather, Ellen Glasgow, Zona Gale, William Faulkner and Rebecca
West. Others you might expect: Margaret Culkin Banning, Katherine
Brush, Temple Bailey, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Fanny Heaslip
Lea and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Yet they all published in the Post,
and Lorimer made no distinctions.

He had, in fact, a narrow view of the word "literature," saying that
only time could decide literary status, and that he did not buy manu-
scripts for their promise of future distinction. An issue containing a
Dreiser story and a serial by Temple Bailey offered no problem at all,
as long as each of them was good enough to be published.

The variety, however, was more apparent than real, as indicated by
the frequency with which these writers published in the Post. A few
of them published in it all of the time. This observation bears on the
economics of magazine authorship. The more often a writer's work ap-
pears in the pages of a magazine, the more it is worth in building that
magazine's circulation, for the reader gets in the habit of looking for
it. Lorimer paid everyone well, but he paid most to the competent
writer who could repeat himself.

Slick Nirvana 89

The pages of the Post during 1934, tne ' ast Y 631 * Lorimer's presi-
dency (before he became board chairman), show how well he had ex-
ploited the value of repetition. During that year each issue, of about a
hundred pages, carried two serials, four or five short stories, and four
or five articles. Among the contributors Sophie Kerr, Mary Roberts
Rinehart, E. Phillips Oppenheimer, Oliver La Farge, I. A. R. Wylie
and Kenneth Roberts each published a serial; Margaret Culkin Ban-
ning, a serial and two articles. John Marquand published a five-part
serial, a six-part serial, and five short stories; Walter D. Edmonds con-
tributed a serial and four short stories. There were also nine stories by
Everett Rhodes Castle, six by Booth Tarkington, five by Richard
Macaulay, four each by Thomas Beer, Ben Ames Williams, Joseph
Hergesheimer, Lucian Gary and Corey Ford, and three by Octavus
Roy Cohen, William Faulkner, and Bernard DeVoto.

Magazine publishing thrives on over-production; it contradicts the
familiar law of supply and demand. The more a given editorial product
appears in the magazine, the more valuable it is. The familiarity of the
author's name helps to maintain circulation. In his Bowker Lecture
Elmer Davis explained this fact. "If you sell any given magazine ten
stories in a year," he said, "you will get more for each story than if you
sold them only three stories a year. It may well be that three stories,
three good stories, are all you have in you that year; but if your produc-
tion falls off your price is likely, sooner or later, to fall off too."

The writer's alternative is to force his production beyond what he
has to say. "So you write your three good stories; and then you use the
tricks of the trade that you have learned and your knowledge of the
tastes of the editors of that particular magazine, to knock off seven
more stories that are good enough good enough to sell with the ad-
vantage of a name well known to the magazine's readers, even though
they might be sent back if they came up from Joe Blotz of Podunk
Corners."

The conditions of the industry which encourage this enormous over-
production penalize all kinds of writers. "But the most regrettable
case of all, which unfortunately is far too common in this country, is
that of the man who has something to say, but not much." The mag-
azines' demands for more of the same "make it practically impossible

90 The Denatured Novel

for a writer to retire into dignified silence when he has said all he has
to say, or to lie fallow for a while if he is going through a period of
sterility."

The predicament of success is a peculiar condition of American au-
thors. For most of them this predicament consists of publishing in the
magazines to pay their bills while trying to write, as the saying goes,
the Great American Novel. This has urged many commercially suc-
cessful writers to a pathological hatred of the magazines.

Henry James's tales of writers who struggle between conscience and
commerce dramatize a universal condition of the artist. But one way
or the other his writers always choose between the alternatives or fail
in attempting both. James's stories are not parochial enough to fit
the American scene; the really genuine American fable is Jack London's
novel, Martin Eden (1909), about a writer who ironically succeeds in
serving both masters.

Martin Eden wants to write a masterpiece, to correlate all knowledge
into the theory of one book; but to keep from starving meanwhile, he
grinds out stories for the magazines and newspaper syndicates. So he
works out the perfect formula. He finds "that the newspaper storiette
should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and should never
contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of
sentiment." But it must contain sentiment, "plenty of it, pure and
noble . . . Tor-God-my-country-and-the-Czar' and 'I-may-be-poor-but-
I-am-honest' brand of sentiment."

This is what will gratify the reader. The mechanical contrivance is
simple, 'The formula consists of three parts: (i) a pair of lovers are
jarred apart; ( 2 ) by some deed or event they are united; ( 3 ) marriage
bells. The third part is an unvarying quantity, but the first and second
parts can be varied an infinite number of times."

Eden's problems really begin after he has succeeded in both his en-
deavors. His masterpiece, a philosophical essay as unpopular as you
could imagine, becomes a great commercial success for all the wrong
and whimsical reasons. It brings him immense notoriety (there is a
fine deadpan satire of his publisher's antics); and the magazines fall
all over themselves begging Eden for the reams of hackwork they have
already rejected.

Slick Nirvana 91

This whole experience, however, has broken him. He has rendered
his life into his masterpiece and has nothing of his own left to say, and
he has outgrown the need to create the dreams of his formula-days.
His situation is hopeless; and since he has nothing left to be, Jack
London puts him to death. The suicide's failure to resolve anything is
only one of the difficulties of this novel. Nevertheless, the condition
of Martin Eden-the-writer, which Jack London abstracted from his
own life, is a fiction which sounds like a good many biographies.

The writing career of Stephen Vincent Benet was just such a battle
with success. For nearly twenty-five years Benet had to depend on the
slicks for most of his income. While his agent, Carl Brandt, master-
minded a career for him with his Cinderella stories, Benet was always
trying to get one story ahead so that he could explore the American
past and write poetry about it. He desperately needed the magazines in
order to live, and he hated them for it.

Benet's diary and his correspondence record his continuous battle
with the magazine editors "ravens/' he called them over their re-
quirements for the "candy-laxative" product: their demands for a
happy ending or a less controversial story. Brandt's rationalization,
"You can change it in the book, 7 ' only maddened him more. The irony
of Benet's first popular success came close to Martin Eden's. He did
manage to write what he wanted, and John Browns Body (1928) be-
came a convincing success. Its large trade sale and Book-of-the-Month
Club distribution brought Benet money and fame. But the truth of
Benet's life was more impossible than London's fiction.

The stock market crash of 1929 sent Benet back to the magazine
chain, and only after he published "The Devil and Daniel Webster"
(in the Post in 1936) did he find some small liberation. It was just a
parole, however. His prices were higher, and he could sell a little more
of what he wanted to write. His disdain of the magazines lasted until
he wrote himself to death.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's disparagement of the slicks is well known. His
letters in The Crack-Up (1945) show how critical he was of his own
work which the slicks published. It was typical of his feelings that he
referred Edmund Wilson to the book version of Tender Is the Night
(1934) rather than the magazine version which "in spots was hastily

92 The Denatured Novel

put together." He had complained to John Peale Bishop that although
he was getting $2,000 a story, they grew worse and worse, and his am-
bition was to be able to ignore the magazines and write novels. Once,
when he could afford to, he turned down an offer of $15,000 for the
serial rights of The Great Gatsby ( 1925 ) .

Even Booth Tarkington, who sold all the fiction he ever published
to the magazines, took the same dim view of them. When his young
friend and neighbor, Kenneth Roberts, learned that Lorimer had in-
structed him to make drastic cuts in his manuscript of The Lively Lady
(1931) he asked Tarkington's advice and then wrote in his diary:
"Consulted Booth; he said at once that I should agree: that magazine
publication was a purely temporary affair, forgotten in a matter of
weeks. Only the book lives and is remembered."

Roberts included this in his personal record, I Wanted to Write
(1949), and among these odds and ends of a long career were some of
Tarkington's letters which related to this magazine-and-book dilemma.
Tarkington was impatient with the novel reader who "seeks to escape
from life itself by the reading of romances a very numerous type."
Though she does ask that the characters be plausible enough for her
to accept them while she reads, "she doesn't want an interpretation of
life."

... it may happen that a serious writer writes a book that just by
chance satisfies and pleases this enormous class of readers; but it prob-
ably won't happen often, since, being serious ... he can't please them
any more than their own lives do, since what he's doing is trying to
paint life as truthfully as he can, and not to tell children bedtime
stories.

The double standard of magazine fiction and book fiction was so well
established in the trade that when John Marquand was ready to pub-
lish The Late George Apley ( 1937) his publisher advised him to adopt
a pseudonym so as not to injure his profitable reputation in the slicks.
This condescending to serious fiction so annoyed Marquand that he
determined to set the record straight. "I have never been able to be

Slick Nirvana 93

patient with this sort of literary calcification/' he explained. "I have
never understood why a sinner is not allowed at least to attempt re-
formation in the American world of letters."

He wrote this in one of the prefaces in North of Grand Central
(1956), a trilogy of his first New England novels. After twelve years
of writing for the slicks Marquand became tired of their inhibitions,
and since he could afford to he began to write to suit himself. With
The Late George Apley he made a startling discovery:

I found that the task of writing it, though occasionally difficult and dis-
couraging, was far easier than the effort I had previously expended on
obviously mediocre serial stories. Yet the result was apparently better
than anything I had achieved previously.

The reason for this was so obvious that I should have recognized it
years before. For almost the first time in my life I had written about
something that I thoroughly understood.

He had not been able to write from his own experience for the maga-
zines; as a professional he had trained himself to write as "an outsider/'
to offer that deft touch of "reality in the details" to satisfy the casual
reader. But his "contrived entertainment" had nothing to do with his
own experience, without which an author has nothing worth saying.
Without the original experience, "no matter how great may be his
skill and brilliance, he is a huckster who is trafficking in the inflated
currency of artificiality."

Marquand's discovery about himself casts light on the awful shadow
of success in which so many American writers have found themselves.
A man must write what he knows and feels, or he cannot believe in
what he writes. If the author cannot believe in it, who will? Like any
other fiction, slick fiction involves this matter of belief. The ideal slick
story is far more than the arrangement of a conflict which resolves
satisfactorily.

For enough money almost any professional writer can learn how to
use a few conventionally off-beat details to suggest a character, how
to make a scene look authenic, or how to hide the evidence of a story's

94 The Denatured Novel

conclusion in the conflict itself. These are the techniques by which an
author tells a slick story and gets away with it. But there is more to
slick fiction than the correspondence courses can teach. It must con-
vince the reader that what he wants to believe is so.

The slick world is a dream-world with an ideology as old as original
sin. In that world the reader is assured of happiness ever after. Most
readers of the slicks are women, although women have no monopoly on
wishful thinking. Everyone desperately wants to rationalize the miser-
ies of the world, and to believe, even temporarily, in some plausible
way of making it all better again. This is the easiest way of vindicating
oneself. Any story which makes this heart-warming face-saving gospel
seem believable is bound to be popular.

This economic fact is of great importance to magazine publishers.
The slick magazine is built on mass circulation, no matter what the
social stratum of its audience. To keep it so, the editor will always try
to gratify this great common yearning for human nature to be good
and for goodness to win.

The trick is to find the writer who believes in it enough to make it
convincing. Frank Munsey, the originator of the ten-cent magazine,
once exclaimed that good writing is as common as clam shells, but
good stories are as rare as statesmanship. If an editor finds a writer
who can write this rare story and write it often, money is no object;
$60,000 a serial is well worth it.

There are very few competent writers who believe that courage and
loyalty will triumph over ignorance and evil, and that virtue will
finally get the better of temptation. The triumph of goodness did not
happen to be the truth of Scott Fitzgerald's or Stephen Benet's or
even Martin Eden's experience. So the magazines must find writers
who can counterfeit the dream-world convincingly and often.

All the rule books say this cannot be done by patronizing the reader,
and they are almost always right. An author cannot borrow a philoso-
phy and make it convincing except occasionally, with great skill and
good luck and a desperate need of money. The bare possibility that a
writer may earn what he needs without contaminating himself in the
process has made the dream a nightmare to all the Martin Edens.

Slick Nirvana 95

Sinclair Lewis has spoken for them all. In 1930 he became the
first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and no sooner
had he won it than he carried to the world his quarrel with the slicks.
Of all American writers, he mourned, "We still most revere the writers
for the popular magazines who in a hearty and edifying chorus chant
... the bucolic and Puritanic simplicity of Uncle Sam." This was
partly a confessional, for Lewis himself was a thoroughly discontented
magazinist.

Even before Main Street was published Lewis had worked his way
up to $1,000 a story in the Post, yet he spoke, with a sense of compro-
mise, of "earning a living by nimble dives into Saturday Evening Post."
These nimble dives required all his dexterity; as he explained, "I have
steadily sought to work out a means of doing as honest work as the
powerful negations of the magazine editors would permit." He wrote
this to Carl Van Doren in a letter dated November, 1920 (later pub-
lished in his selected writings, The Man from Main Street, 1953).

The pain of Lewis 7 compromise was acute during the two years in
which he finished and published Main Street. His letters to his pub-
lisher, Alfred Harcourt (in Harrison Smith's From Main Street to
Stockholm, 1952) record the author's struggle with himself. After
Harcourt, Brace announced the novel to the trade in May 1920, ad-
vance orders promised an unusual sale; and the excitement of reviewers
promised even more in the way of prestige for its author. But Lewis
was out of money. While finishing the novel, he had managed to pay
his bills by selling stories to the Post and to Harpers, but as yet without
any book royalties he was worse than bankrupt. His future was compli-
cated by the prospect of a succes d'estime whose sales, he felt, his mag-
azine writing would only injure. He described his dilemma in a letter
to Harcourt (November 30, 1920).

I am, frankly, having a hell of a time in trying at once to turn myself
back into the successful S. E. P. writer I was a year ago and yet do
for them nothing but stories so honest that they will in no way get me
back into magazine trickiness nor injure the M St. furore.

96 The Denatured Novel

He explained that he had just destroyed a sixty-thousand-word manu-
script which he could have sold handsomely to the Post, "but which
was so shallow, so unreal, so sentimental that (featured as they do
feature a serial, even a short one) it would have been very bad for
Main Street."

God knows I don't expect you to bear the responsibility for this, which
may have been foolhardy. I relate it only to prove how vigorously I
have been attacking this problem. . . . I'm going, of course, to go on
plugging at the Post, but I don't believe I shall ever again be the facile
Post trickster I by God was for which, doubtless, we shall in the long
run be glad.

Lewis' experience with serializing his novels aggravated his either/or
attitude about fiction. Free Air (1919) had only a modest sale, which
he blamed on its manner of publication. The Post had run the orig-
inal serial which Lewis then revised, nearly doubling its length for a
book. Lorimer persuaded Lewis to run the new material as a separate
serial in the Post. When the book failed Lewis decided its prospective
buyers had already read it.

He and Alfred Harcourt agreed thereafter to withhold the serial
rights to his novels, but neither one lived up to this agreement. Har-
court later sold the magazine rights to Arrowsmith ( 1925) for $50,000;
and Lewis wrote a serial for Colliers which he persuaded Harcourt to
bring out as a book. This was called Mantrap (1926). Neither author
nor publisher regarded it highly, although Lewis felt called upon to
defend it. He wrote to Harcourt (November 10, 1925), "I recall noth-
ing shoddy in it, and as for the critics who insist that I have no right to
do anything but social documents, they may all go to hell."

Lewis' lame excuse emphasized Mantrap's curious relation to his
other novels of the period. It followed Main Street (1920) and
Babbitt (1922) and preceded Dodsworth (1929), all of which it ap-
proximates and all of which exceed it. That it was not a "social docu-
ment," as he put it, is one way of saying that it does not represent
Lewis' view of experience.

Slick Nirvana 97

In fact, Mantrap offers no view of experience whatsoever; no presid-
ing idea grows out of its conflict. It is a listless failure. Yet it is mechan-
ically like the three contemporary novels which Lewis never intended
to be serialized. A reading of the serial and novels reveals how Lewis
tried to accommodate the magazine values in the serial.

Mantrap tells of a mis-marriage between a fur trader at Hudson Bay
and a manicurist he has met in Minneapolis. Mantrap Landing, the
desolate scene of most of the novel, is inhabited by unfriendly Indians
and friendly trappers, both of which jeopardize the virtue of this lonely
bride. Their presence threatens her with a fate alleged to be worse than
death. She loves her husband, but not enough to live with him faith-
fully at Mantrap; and he loves her, but not enough to move away from
the place.

The marriage falls apart when a bachelor from New York City, who
has arrived on a canoe trip, discovers his love for the woman and pru-
dently decides to leave. But she escapes with him; and after an arduous
chase across the wilderness the husband catches up with the pair, insist-
ing that he must save his friend from his wife. They sit down and talk
it over, but after exploring all possibilities they separate, each return-
ing to the place he started from. Here the serial stops. No one has
changed, and the story proves only the dissolution of a marriage which
gave no promise in the first place. Nothing is really at stake because
there is nothing by which to judge this marriage; the story contains no
analogies. All its vigorous talk of a conflict between wilderness and
civilization cannot fill the vacancy.

The plot of this serial about the estrangement of a husband and wife
is exactly like the plot of Main Street, of Babbitt, and of Dodsworth.
The serial and the novels all depend on a scheme of trap and escape.
In each, one spouse is trapped by the marriage, and the course of this
marriage carries the meaning of the book. Babbitt's estrangement and
reconciliation make him finally realize his own littleness in conforming
to the mores which contradict what he really wants, Carol Kennicott's
marriage makes her realize how in need of reform she herself is. Dods-
worth's separation from his wife forces him to reappraise all the mate-
rial values he has taken for granted.

Mantrap has all of the machinery but none of the significance of

98 The Denatured Novel

these others. Lewis' belittling view of humanity, after all, was not con-
genial to the dream world of the slicks. But when he tried to write a
story without that belittling view he had nothing very convincing to
put in its place.

The scheme of trap and escape, so compatible with magazine fiction,
continually tempted Lewis. Martin Arrowsmith's first fiancee and his
second wife threatened to confine and distort his intellectual ideals.
Lewis planned still another novel about the situation of a marriage,
whose projection even though he never wrote the book seems per-
fectly clear: "the story of a young couple bucking society in a city
about Minneapolis; a story of that never yet adequately described but
extremely important phase of American life middle-class existence in
an American cross between town and city. . . ."

He wrote this to Harcourt (October 22, 1919), continuing, "I am
planning such a story, with a lot of drama and unexpectedness but also
complete reality, as a serial for Sat Even Post, and I may do it before
I go on with Main Street which will almost certainly NOT go as a
serial." Here was the young writer counting two novels before they
were hatched, calculating on the same plot, the same substance, but
different values, and doling them out: one for George Horace Lorimer
and one for Alfred Harcourt.

Without that genuine belief in the dream world which distinguishes
the real magazine serialist, each slick writer must find some way of his
own to make the conflict turn out believably but also without offend-
ing the readers' platitudes. This was where Lewis had failed. His maga-
zine serial simply offered the logical consequence of what the conflict
had promised at the beginning. Lewis had suppressed any adventitious
change which might have made things turn out better.

This was his concession to art avoiding the "magazine tricki-
ness," as he put it. But in serving the magazine he also suppressed any
idea the plot might have suggested as the plot had suggested ideas
in his novels. Since Lewis never could write a good story, this compro-
mise was not very convincing.

The story sense, which Lewis lacked, was precisely what enabled
Booth Tarkington to succeed in counterfeiting the values of the slick
world. Tarkington had strong ideas, as Lewis did, about human petti-

Slick Nirvana 99

ness and irresponsibility and the degrading materialism America had
come to worship. His convictions did not agree with the platitudes of
the dream world, but he managed to make his stories assimilate his
attitudes and still appear to turn out all right.

Tarkington made the perfect compromise over and over again, the
compromise that most novelists have had to face. He said exactly what
he wanted to say and made everybody love it. For nearly fifty years his
fiction about American families at home and abroad so epitomized the
national culture that he became a celebrity. It was somewhat less ap-
parent, all this while, that he also epitomized the goal of every Ameri-
can novelist, which was to render his own convictions, however sober-
ing, and to be popular at the same time.

Between his first book in 1899 and his death in 1946 Tarkington
published thirty-nine volumes of prose fiction, and wrote twenty-one
plays for the professional stage. He also wrote six plays for magazine
and radio audiences, two volumes of essays, and a book about painting.
A fragmentary novel and three short novels were published after he
died.

Still, there was more. Six magazine serials remain among his uncol-
lected writings, along with two hundred short stories and as many
articles and editorial essays. But he had more than facility and stam-
ina, he had the knack of satisfying the magazines. Every novel and
story Tarkington published in book form all thirty-nine volumes-
first appeared in a magazine.

The means of this accomplishment bear looking into, for they were
the means of counterfeiting the dream-world. To begin with, Tarking-
ton observed the technical necessities of serial fiction. His novels are
simple constructions in the narrative present with seldom a detour into
the past. The main conflict is evident in the first episode, and smaller
conflicts which amplify it along the way are comfortably divisible into
installments. The characters all appear early; they are identified by their
responses to the situation in which they are discovered (as in a stage
play), and except for the hero or the heroine they remain unchanged.
There is nothing to confuse the suspense between installments.

Tarkington took particular care of his conflict by building his novels
backward or so he said. (Any author's statement about "how he did

ioo The Denatured Novel

it" is always questionable. ) Tarkington once described his method in
a publicity questionnaire which the Literary Guild customarily sends
out to its authors, although the Guild never publicized this particular
discovery. "I make a detailed outline or synopsis before beginning the
manuscript of the novel," Tarkington wrote. "This synopsis begins at
the end or final scene and goes backward from the opening of the story.
I use this method because it produces its own order of action." And
this, he explained, "means that you cannot change the course of the
story without producing disorder, fumbling and uncertainty."

Unlike the serialist, Temple Bailey, who relied on sharing the desires
which her readers wrote to her as she continued her stories, Tarking-
ton would not change a story's resolution. He had to plan for it to turn
out all right. Despite its dubious function of publicity, Tarkington's
statement happens to explain plausibly what went wrong with so many
of his novels.

One such failure is The Lorenzo Bunch (1936), about neighboring
families in an apartment house. The novel was supposed to feature a
conflict between a husband and wife, each with a liaison on the other
side of town. Early in the story, however, the neighbors in this apart-
ment house begin to come alive and to steal the scene from the hero
and heroine. These limited people are so bored by their confined ex-
istence that they have resigned their private lives to a kind of com-
munal emotion. Tarkington had something big going here when it
came time to resolve the crisis. The synopsis had called for the heroine's
panting escape from an extra-marital situation, but meanwhile too
many live characters had got involved for any quick solution to be
convincing, and Tarkington needed more room than five installments
of McCalVs could accommodate.

Firm, pre-meditated resolutions often jostled Tarkington's novels
out of proportion by denying any real development of the characters
or any resonance to their involvements. The problem was that in order
to express his own attitudes about human shortcomings Tarkington
had to tell two stories at once his own and the magazine's. Turmoil
(1915), for instance, is about a father trespassing on his sons in order
to build an industrial empire for himself, but this gets absorbed into a
magazine story about one of the sons. This is typical.

Slick Nirvana 101

This magazine story is always the same. It is the story of Parsifal or
of Jack-and-the-Beanstalk: of the lowly hero who is scorned but who
proves himself and then collects the rewards of his courage and virtue.
It is the exile and return of Monsieur Beaucaire, of the Gentleman
from Indiana, of Bibbs in Turmoil and Dan Oliphant in The Mid-
lander, (1923), of Tom Vanrevel and Hatcher Ide and Irvie Pease.
What each of these Tarkington heroes most resembles is all of the
others.

This was Tarkington's permanent sub-story. He was skillful at local-
izing it and merging it with recognizable conflicts in the American
society. In its purest form, uncontaminated by any ideas, Tarkington
called it The Conquest of Canaan (1905), a fable that explains all of
his fiction %

Canaan is a small, conventional Midwestern community in the
i88o's, whose 1 citizens measure themselves by money and "position,"
and who have no room in their hearts for the hero. On one side of
town at the end of a long, comfortable lawn, in a Victorian mansion
lives Judge Martin Pike, a large man who has always "stood for all
that was respectable and financial/' On the other side of town, along
the river front and near a disreputable dance-hall arej called Beaver
Beach young Joe Louden has grown up.

Louden is a lawyer and an outcast in his own town except for the
loyal friendship of Ariel Tabor. She has grown up with Joe, and was
something of an outcast herself until her uncle's legacy and a trip to
Paris bestowed beauty and desirability upon her. When it develops
that her trustee, Judge Pikq, has embezzled her inheritance, it becomes
Joe Louden's formidable chore to rescue what is left of the girl's money.
One other obstacle is the presence of Joe's urbane step-brother who
went East to college and has now returned to ingratiate himself with
Judge Pike.

Here ended the first installment in Harpers Magazine, but the
reader who wanted to jump at conclusions had to wait for five more
installments until Judge Pike was defeated (exposed, in fact, as the
owner of the disreputable Beaver Beach); and it took one more install-
ment after that for Joe Louden to head off another suitor and win
Ariel Tabor for his own.

102 The Denatured Novel

The heroine of The Conquest is one of Tarkington's permanent fix-
tures. She stands for health and vitality, tolerance and understanding,
and sensitivity. Except for one or two tiny but obvious imperfections
she is an abstraction of all positive human qualities; being abstract, she
satisfies the need for what the trade calls "reader-identity."

Outside the story this heroine is no more credible than the picture
of the girl on the magazine cover, but within it she fulfills a necessary
function. The hero is at odds with his world, and someone must under-
stand him and champion whatever cause he may have. Since he is not
perfect, yet perfectible, someone must correct his mistakes and fur-
nish him with an ideal. Since he must arrive at a marriageable age
anyway, this virtuous woman's love denotes his earthly as well as his
spiritual success. She is not a person but a project.

Tarkington later invented a childhood for this typical heroine in
Kate Fennigate ( 1943) . After burying her alcoholic father and her in-
valid mother this orphan girl grows up in a household where everyone
uses her good intentions and selfishly exploits her. But this strenuous
training in virtue pays off, for after Kate has grown up and married she
discovers that her acquired patience is really her best asset in subtly
managing her husband's life.

The heroine is just one of the caricatures in Canaan. Another is the
hero's step-brother, who stands for everything the hero is not. This
counterpart turns up in most of Tarkington's novels, and like Cinder-
ella's older sisters, he always offers the alternative. Over the years Tar-
kington worked every possible permutation of the counterpart char-
acters, with heroes and heroines, pleasant and unpleasant.

The counterpart is a technical device with distinct advantages for
the slick story. It is quick, it increases the possibility of explicit con-
flict; and the reader is assured of the virtue of one character by indulg-
ing in the unpleasantness of the other. It is also a kind of mirror-writing
in which, however, the object and the image reflect only unreality. It
is no different in Tarkington's fiction than it was in the novels of
G. P. R. James, one hundred years ago; and E. P. Whipple's judgment
still stands: "We demand human beings, not embodied antitheses, or
personified qualities, thoughts, or passions."

Tarkington contrived a certain efficiency with this device by having

Slick Nirvana 103

his counterparts take sides in the conflict of some larger ideas, which
is how he managed to dramatize his own opinions. He also occasionally
exploited the possibilities of the character with the split personality.
Usually, this double-character has temporarily acquired a new appear-
ance: by an accident (in The Guest of Quesnay, 1908) or by education
(in Mirthful Haven, 1930), or by being spoiled (in Image of Josephine,
1945) . The new state of affairs is always dreadful until the exiled char-
acter begins to discover his old self again. Then he returns to conquer
Canaan.

Tarkington made this double-character convincing only twice, in two
different books: a farce called Presenting Lily Mars (1933), and Alice
Adams ( 1921 ) . Lily Mars has a job in a theatrical company and a small
part in a play about to open. She is so obsessed with making good that
she creates an off-stage role for herself which upsets the entire produc-
tion. Her double-character is convincing enough for the farce, but only
in Alice Adams does the convention reveal anything about live human
beings.

Overcome by her own mediocrity, Alice Adams manages to convince
herself that she is somebody else, a Miss Adams with a self-respecting
father, with money and clothes and a college education, a girl whose
charm and beauty is the toast of her many friends. But even as she car-
ries on this public performance she realizes its imminent failure and
tries to evaluate her two selves.

Alice's father also devises an escape from the dead-end of his own
life; and he too deceives himself to anyone who will listen. Having stag-
nated for years as the head of the "sundries" department in a drug com-
pany, he dreams of manufacturing a new glue with a formula he long
ago discovered. His wife is willing to be deluded. Father and daughter
and mother press farther into their own imaginations, each repeating
the others' deceptions, each believing in his own. Each comments on
the others without knowing it, and the analogy of their lives is the only
dreary truth there is.

This is Tarkington's finest novel. It is resonant and vital. It is also
an explicit denial of the dream world. The dream is a fake which
thrives on fear, which feeds on dignity until there is no dignity left.
Alice Adams uses the same fixtures as Tarkington's other novels use:

1 04 The Denatured Novel

the conventional heroine and the conventional double-character; but
this time the conventions themselves are the subject and subject to
judgment.

Alice Adams was the great irony of Tarkington's career. It was the
only time he made the dream-world completely real and then, only
by demolishing it. And it was the only time he ever tried. Although he
continued to write for twenty-five years after its publication, his later
novels were merely more skillful counterfeits than their predecessors.
This fact does not square very well with what he once told Kenneth
Roberts about the permanence of books and the transience of maga-
zines.

Tarkington wrote, in the Literary Guild's questionnaire: "My books
are rather various both in substance and in manner. One of them tried
to do and be one thing, and one of them tried to do and be another."
But only one of them is really various and wholly lifelike. What he
meant by 'Variety" can be explained, in the others, by the ingenious
transfer of old fixtures to new settings.

The most valid criticism of Tarkington's fiction is that there is too
much of it. It belongs to that great bulk which Elmer Davis called "not
what somebody wanted to write, but what somebody else wanted to
get written." The reason there was too much of it lay in the economics
of magazine publishing. Booth Tarkington, the magazinist, epitomizes
the paralyzing success of American authorship, for he counterfeited
the slick Nirvana so well that he came to believe in it.

Chapter V

Hollywood Pay-Off

THE American motion picture industry, which began in 1896, during
the past fifty years has become the trade publisher's largest customer.
Within this brief period the movies have eroded the novel form more
than anything else in the novel's history.

The film itself and the economic organization of the industry have
caused this damage. The film narrative is limiting. It necessarily
abridges the complexities of any subject it narrates. It is more suscep-
tible than the novel to clear, uncomplicated attitudes, but American
producers have nearly always forced just such clear and uncomplicated
attitudes upon it. The size of the industry extends this damage.

The film industry outgrew the penny arcades and shooting galleries
of the iSgo's so rapidly that by 1939 it grossed annually more than
three-fourths, and netted more than ninety per cent, of the income of
the entire entertainment field in the United States. By 1925 the film
studios were paying prices in six figures for the film rights to novels. By
1931 Cheney's Economic Survey of the Book Industry described a new
occupational disease called "novelist's nystagmus," which was "caused
by keeping one eye on the typewriter and the other on Hollywood."

The same factors which have caused the film industry to give way to
television in recent years have even increased purchases of fiction by
motion picture studios. The cost of manufacturing and distributing
motion pictures rose so high after World War II that most producers
merely leased the facilities of a few giant corporations already in busi-
ness. The possibility of producing a movie on credit and without cap-

105

1 06 The Denatured Novel

ital investment has enticed many venturesome people, and some have
succeeded. There are 125 so-called independent producers now buying
novels for films, none of whom were even in business fifteen years ago.

This bidding for literary property has driven prices sky-high, al-
though the bidding goes highest among the few established corpora-
tions. At the moment the record is held by zoth Century-Fox, which
commissioned Grace Metalious to write a sequel to her notorious best
seller Peyton Place (1956) for $265,000. The record is only temporary,
however, because high prices have great publicity value.

This was an important transaction for more than just the money in-
volved, because the whole idea of this second novel was instigated not
by the author or even the publisher or the reprinter, but by the film
company. The amount of money had nothing to do with the sequel
itself which did not even exist at the time except as an idea in the
producer's mind. The price was established solely on the strength of
the publicity which had been generated for Peyton Place, and which
had helped to sell eight million copies of that novel in all editions and
to promote a successful motion picture. Some publicity, it was thought,
would doubtless rub off on another novel by the same author, and
another picture. So the studio got enough copy for the new scenario,
in the approved Hollywood fashion by commissioning the author to
write a new manuscript to be called Return to Peyton Place.

Although the price was higher than usual, this whole transaction was
characteristic. Publishers' Weekly was talking about "cinema novels"
back in 1917. Today, although the film rights to most novels fetch less
than $35,000, Hollywood buys literary property but really pays for its
notoriety. The merest possibility of notoriety keeps the film companies
always interested in an editorial partnership with authors.

Suppose an author has a manuscript in progress and a contract with
a publisher. If a film company were to buy an option on the completed
work, all parties would benefit, including the agent who handled it.
The film company would get a title and an author's name. The author
would have more money to start with, shared equally with the pub-
lisher. Everyone would have a surer piece of merchandise, and if the
book were finally filmed, the publisher and the producer would profit
by promoting the book together.

Hollywood Pay-Oft 107

The film company is not interested solely in an easily adaptable
novel, it wants the best novel it can get. This is not a matter of being
noble; it is simply good business. When the time conies, a screen
writer can translate the book into a film better than its author can.
Meanwhile, any book a lot of people will talk about is the property the
producer wants most. The motion picture studio will be glad to retain,
of course, whatever movie values the novel itself may have.

This enlightened attitude prevails only because all other means of
editorial collaboration have usually failed, although there have been a
great many experiments, all of them undertaken in the film industry's
urgent need for story material. Ever since 1900, when the Frenchman,
Georges Melies, filmed the first multi-scene narrative (the sequence of
Cinderella), the industry has needed more stories than it could get.
The motion picture studios have scavenged fiction from the public do-
main and purchased what they had to, even as they hired gangs of
writers to generate more.

Published fiction had a particular appeal to the movie industry long
before the idea of coordinated book promotion. In the early days, under
threat of organized boycott for filming censorable stories, producers
found a reasonable guarantee of respectability in the fact of a novel's
prior publication. If a story were questionable, at least the producer
could take the position that it was not his fault. If a book had some
vintage, so much the better. Thus, by 191 3 there had already been four
motion pictures based on the Leather Stocking Tales and three on
The Scarlet Letter.

Adapting published fiction, however, quickly involved the problem
of copyrights. A test case of the film studios 7 liability for the use of
literary property, involving finally a Supreme Court decision, changed
the whole prospect of trade-book publishing. In 1907 Sidney Olcott
produced for Kalem studio a motion picture of Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur
(1880), and like the novel the film found an immense audience. Still
one of the most expensive films ever made, it cost an estimated $6,000,-
ooo. Partly because of its notoriety, Wallace's publisher brought suit.

The case was settled in 1911, with a judgment against Kalem for
$50,000. During the litigation other studios began paying token sums
for literary property: D. W. Griffith, for instance, paid $100 for the

io8 The Denatured Novel

film rights to Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona (1884). But the
decision in the Ben-Hur case sanctioned new prices for fiction. Since
the industry now had to purchase fiction, a studio was wise to buy a
novel with proven salability.

Best-selling fiction consequently became valuable property. In 1920
Eleanor Porter sold the film rights to Pollyanna (1913) for $80,000;
current novels by Rex Beach, Jack London, Ben Ames Williams, Booth
Tarkington, Richard Harding Davis and Irving Bacheller brought com-
parable sums for screenplays. The novel's most valuable asset, of
course, was its author's name. This fact led the studios to experiment
in editorial collaboration. They began to hire novelists to make their
own adaptations.

Occasionally it worked. The film industry's most efficient novelist
was Zane Grey, who finally adopted the system of sending the manu-
script chapter of a novel to the film studio even before he sent it to
his publisher. One result of this efficiency was that Grey sold the film
rights to more novels for something over forty motion pictures than
any other writer has ever sold. Samuel Goldwyn succeeded for awhile
in hiring novelists to make their own adaptations. In 1919 he organized,
within the Goldwyn Company, Eminent Authors Pictures Incorpo-
rated, a group of writers who would direct the screen adaptation of
their own fiction: Gertrude Atherton, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rupert
Hughes, Gouverneur Morris, Basil King and Rex Beach. This organi-
zation led the way to all kinds of contracts between authors and
studios, involving publishing rights to publish present and future works
and the author's services for original screenplays.

During the 1920'$ the writer became the highest-paid worker in the
movie industry. Whereas he had once earned $5 to $15 for a story idea,
in 1906, he could now earn $1,000 to $2,500 a week in salary or $10,000
to $25,000, for piecework. Meanwhile the studio profited by his name.
But most of the contracts worked only in theory. Hiring well-known
writers continued through the thirties, but authors and producers alike
began to discover diminishing returns.

The trouble was that the studios bought properties and services they
could never use. It is customary in the film industry, unlike the book
trade, for a writer to submit his work simultaneously to several pro-

Hollywood Pay-Oft ' 109

ducers. Buying competitively, the studios not only overstocked their
manuscripts but made most of their purchases sight unseen a routine
procedure which would horrify any publisher. Like the purchased
novel, the purchased author's services seldom fitted the requirements.
Hiring novelists to write scenarios turned out to be a misappropriation
of skills, rather like hiring a cabinet maker for carpentry.

Scores of writers have fled from Hollywood and lived to tell about it
in sour novels or in angry statements which the magazines are more
than happy to publish. Writers have always complained even Sam
Goldwyn's Eminent Authors that they were hired not to write but
to practice some fancied verbal specialty, such as plots or gags or dia-
logues, and to collaborate with other writers who were also paid not to
write. The waste of effort and money over stories that were abandoned
was infuriating, but their bitterest complaint was over the ruining of
literary property. After the studio improved what he had written the
author could scarcely recognize the mess.

Adapting a story to a screenplay in Hollywood is a matter of shrewd
improvisation. Writers are paid to reassemble ideas borrowed from
screenplays that have already succeeded. This is exactly what has al-
ways happened in the book trade. And when the author and screen-
writer, Mildred Cram, described this process in the American Spec-
tator Year Book (1934), she spoke for all embattled writers in Holly-
wood. "You aje, let us say, writing a scene of seduction. Someone re-
minds you of the great seduction scene in 'The Guardsman/ Formula
Number Eighty. Or someone else calls your attention to the sure-fire
seduction in 'Red Dust.' "

They like 'em strong, fundamental, earthy. The anemic heroine is
out. Let's write this straight from the shoulder maybe with a laugh
you know, like that scene in "Farewell to Arms," where she laughed at
herself. That was a wow. People loved it!

Presto, your seduction scene is a patchwork of the best seduction
scenes! Formulas eighty to nine hundred, inclusive!

Every writer in Hollywood sooner or later discovers that what is "ac-
ceptable" in fiction has already been prescribed for him. The only tol-

1 10 The Denatured Novel

erable invention what he is hired for is some new twist of a few old
and salable ideas. This is so because the screenplay is not an autono-
mous art form, and never has been; it has always been a by-product of
something else. In the whole history of the industry the motion picture
itself has served one master after another.

Right from the start the film industry has belonged to the manufac-
turers of production equipment (cameras and projectors, and later,
sound recording and projecting devices). The manufacturer has re-
garded the tnotion picture as merely an adjunct to his main line of busi-
ness. This emphasis began with the industry in 1896, in New York City,
in Koster and Rial's Music Hall by utter chance on Shakespeare's
birthday when a machine known as the Vitascope projected onto a
screen a filmstrip lasting about a minute and a half.

The projector was Thomas Armat's improvement of the Kinetescope
which Thomas Edison had invented in 1889, partially patented in
1891, and installed in penny arcades. Edison's peep-show had allowed
only one viewer at a time to see the filmstrip, but Armat's projector,
enabling an audience, made real profit possible. For seven or eight
years, Armat, Edison, and several other manufacturers experimented
with cameras and with the production of motion pictures, and by 1903
they had established a pattern of control by leasing to exhibitors both
their projectors and their films. They maintained this control.

In 1908 four manufacturers including Edison and Armat pooled
their patents and organized the Motion Picture Patents Company, to
restrain competition and to keep the market for themselves. Although
this trust was liquidated in the courts in 1917, three years after it had
lost most of the market to independent manufacturers, it had forced a
characteristic growth on the industry. Controlling the market for mo-
tion pictures mean controlling three separate but related operations:
production, distribution, and exhibition; and in order to fight the trust,
independent producers had to achieve similar control.

The economic development of the industry after 1920 merely con-
centrated control in fewer and larger corporations, each combining pro-
duction and distribution facilities with a chain of theaters. This was
speeded up after the invention of the talking picture in 1926. By 1929
the silent film was no longer profitable, and the motion picture com-

Holly wood Pay-Oft - 111

panics and their film studios gradually fell under the dominion of
the manufacturers of recording as well as projecting equipment: West-
ern Electric, a subsidiary of the Bell system, and later, R.C.A., which
bought a film studio and a chain of theaters in order to market its own
patents.

By 1929 there were five major combinations engaged in the produc-
tion, distribution, and exhibition of films: Warner Brothers, Para-
mount, Loew's, zoth Century-Fox, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum. Within
each of these combinations film production was determined not by the
studios but by distributors and exhibitors. After the stock-market crash
these major combinations could no longer finance new operations out
of earnings, and outside capital (from banks, real estate holders, and
motion picture finance companies) exerted new influence on the pro-
duction of films.

Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry (1944), by Mae
D. Huettig, gets to the significance of this within its first chapter: "The
fact that the major producers of film have not been forced to rely ex-
clusively on the excellence of the product itself for profit may contrib-
ute to an understanding of many questions concerning the progress of
the film as an art form." Every change in the industry has resulted in
making this art form a more efficient source of income for capital in-
vested in related properties.

This includes literary properties. Since Armat's invention of the
Vitascope, every economic crisis in the industry has increased its de-
mand on the book trade for more fiction. Competition between inde-
pendent producers and the Motion Picture Patents Company, after
1909, resulted in the feature-length film. Two world wars shut off Euro-
pean competition even as they increased the world market for Ameri-
can motion pictures. The invention of the talkies added major pro-
ducing companies to the industry, and caused an increase in the pro-
duction of films. The box-office decline in the early i93o 7 s prompted
the double-feature program, offering twice as many reels for the view-
er's money. Every major change in the business increased the need for
screenplays and the value of literary property.

After World War II independent producers joined the industry in
force. Their presence expresses more than a growing need of story ma-

112 The Denatured Novel

terial. They typify Hollywood's precarious financial position. They are
independent in name only, since their business is entirely answerable
to the banks and the distributing companies who control their credit.
The so-called independent sets out to produce a film with nothing but
a few contracts and a large debt. His creditors have not loaned him a
clime without being satisfied that his product will make money.

The values of fiction arc box-office values, as far as the screenplay
is concerned. The fact that businessmen have always controlled the
major companies which the screenplay serves, accounts for some of the
weird ideas the so-called "business values" which box-office sales are
supposed to reflect. One axiom is that the film serves one vast public
which it must please at all costs. Another axiom, until the independent
producers (artists mostly) proved otherwise, was that the more a prod-
uct costs the better it is.

These two axioms have generally limited the content of motion pic-
tures to more expensive elaborations of what has already been pre-
sumed to please everyone. The industry's rising costs, which increase
the capital risk, have always made it prudent to continue this policy of
elaborate imitation. A major producer-distributing company with its
staggering overhead must spend at least $1,000,000 for every one of its
fifteen or twenty pictures a year. Merely breaking even is too great a
risk.

The so-called "business values" partly explain the manipulation of
literary property so that it will all look alike on the screen, but there is
another economic cause which insures manipulation. This is the star
system, which has hypnotized the entire industry: the process of pub-
licizing actors and then building movies to exploit their box-office ap-
peal. The star system functioned as early as 1910. It was one of the
weapons used by independent producers in their battle with the li-
censed members of the Motion Picture Patents Company,

Carl Laemmle began the star system and Adolf Zukor amplified it,
stressing certain personalities rather than motion pictures. But by hav-
ing featured personalities on the pay rolls, producers then had to pro-
tect their investments with large salaries. Box-office response to the
first of these stars, Florence Lawrence and King Baggott, then Mary
Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Minnie Maddern Fiske

Hollywood Pay-Oft ' 113

and James K. Hackett, justified their inflated salaries. Justification, in
each case, meant more pictures like the last. Audiences typed the stars
good or wicked, strong, tender, seductive, wistful or whatever and
these traits had to be repeated.

Type casting resulted in reassembling over and over the same limited
and calculable stories to fit a star's public personality. The star system
even influenced the distribution of motion pictures. When theater
owners demanded more of the stars, the producer used this bargaining
power to lease his other, less publicized and less costly pictures. Adolf
Zukor's producing company, Famous Players, classified its releases as
"A" "B" or "C" pictures, depending on cost and an estimation of box-
office appeal, a rating system which became indispensable to the in-
dustry after the introduction of double-features in the 1930'$.

The star system and the classification of first- and second-class mer-
chandise affected the purchase of literary property in a particular man-
ner. Any scenario begins from one of two sources: an "original," writ-
ten to prescription; or a published work of fiction, drama, biography, or
history. Originals are characteristically the source of "B" pictures,
which include nearly all of the Westerns, but most "A" pictures begin
with a book already published.

By Hollywood's Alice-in-Wonderland logic, anything that costs
more is better. The star needs a vehicle whose notoriety will match his
own. If the author's name has news value, so much the better. The
announcement of an inflated sales price appears to endorse the worth
of the literary property, but its worth is only its ability to attract atten-
ion. What it becomes in the film is something else again.

The look-alike quality of the movies is never left to chance; it is a
studied quality. The absolute values are the same as those in the dream-
world of the slick magazines. The pursuit of happiness engages the
hero and the heroine, and these tabloid characters are revealed only
with regard to the particular conflict which besets their pursuit. In the
resolution of this conflict everyone is paid off in kind. All that varies
(with the same regularity) is how the pay-off is delivered, how the
values of the hero and the heroine are vindicated.

The obvious fixtures of this dream-world have scarcely changed since
they were cataloged under the auspices of the Motion Picture Research

H4 L ne uenaiurea i\ o vei

Council twenty-five years ago. Edgar Dale's comprehensive report, The
Content of Motion Pictures (1935), is based on the evidence, discov-
ered by a team of researchers in 1,500 motion pictures released between
1920 and 1932. This is what they found.

Romantic love and crime were the subjects of most of these motion
pictures. There were far more characters living on high income in the
films than in actuality, and material well-being was what heroes and
heroines wanted. As for the superficial realism of setting, the urban
scene, particularly New York City, predominated. The most frequently
used interior set was the bedroom, although love-making, symbolized
by the kiss and embrace, occurred most commonly in the living room.
Illicit love was the intent of the villains more than the heroes. (Movie
villains, characteristically in their thirties, are older and more faded
than heroes.) The happy ending, enforced by the star system, clearly
prevailed.

This inventory gains significance, not originally intended, in view of
the palling sameness of the substance. Even before the Dale report the
expedience of the movies aroused indignation. At the height of the in-
dustry's independence of outside and cautious capital, when movie
companies cojjld produce whatever they wanted, John Gould Fletcher
indicted producing companies for what he called The Crisis of the
Film (1929).

"To produce something that could be understood quickly, sold
quickly, repeated quickly, has been mainly their aim," Fletcher
charged. "Their aim was to give the public exactly what it wanted, and
if they found out that the public wanted one type of thing, to go on
giving that thing with as little variation as possible." This resulted, he
said, in "propaganda for the emotional monotony, the naive morality,
the sham luxury . . . the sentimental, and the acrobatic that are so com-
mon in the United States."

Only the costumes and the customs have changed with the times.
The experience remains. The movies kept pace with the change in
sexual mores, for instance, from the Mary Pickford vehicle, Pollyanna
(1920), through the vamps played by Theda Bara, to the aggressive,
likable, worldly woman personified by Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard,
and Mae West.

Hollywood Pay-Off '115

The new films kept up with the fashions by mocking the mores of
their predecessors. The vamp pictures mocked the behavior of the
Pollyannas, and the Mae West pictures mocked the prudery with
which the vamp had been characteristically defeated in her desires. But
all of these films shared the same kind of moral posture. All of them
reveled in the behavior assumed at that moment to be a trespass, before
retributing it.

Such posturing, of course, belongs to popular entertainment. The
movies have not tampered with vulgar expedience. They have simply
exploited the same appeal with which Samuel Richardson's Pamela
made its prurient plea for chastity. That book, like its heroine, sold
extraordinarily well. The movies have merely rearranged the pay-off.
The story of the heroine breathless from the lover's pursuit but holding
out for marriage has been filmed under one title or another since the
movie industry began.

Moral posturing encompasses more than chastity, as the crime pic-
tures demonstrated after the Legion of Decency was founded in 1934.
Prior to this censoring organization films presented crime without edi-
torial comment, more or less in the guise of documenting American
urban life. When the spokesmen for censoring groups had had enough
of this, however, crime pictures brought the criminal to harsh justice
in the last few minutes of the film, having already celebrated for an
hour-and-a-quarter the criminal's modus operandi. Sham moralizing
has also marked most of the so-called sociological films about the rights
of labor, the problems of White and Negro, divorce dilemmas, juve-
nile delinquency, and the ethics of Big Business.

Pleasing the public has been carefully assured in the film industry.
Courting pleasure or avoiding trespass takes the form of pre-censor-
ship, a review conducted before a picture's release and designed to
avoid costly litigation. Pre-censorship has existed since 1909, when the
Motion Picture Patents Company responded to the fears of church-
men and public officials (which newspapers and magazines gleefully
printed) that the movies were conducting an organized public de-
moralization. The Company organized a censorship board to review
the productions of its member studios.

With this precedent the major film companies adopted in 1930 a list

1 1 6 The Denatured Novel

of commandments and prohibitions known as the Motion Picture
Production Code. The Code is still enforced by a board of the indus-
try's trade association once known as the Hayes Office nominally
independent but actually a sounding board for private, vocal lobbies
political, religious, professional and civic, and comprised of the ubiqui-
tous club woman engaged in special pleading and in the state of
public morals. The power of this official censoring group lies in its
right to withhold its endorsement of any motion picture. On the basis
of this awesome power it "recommends" the deletion of anything of-
fensive to the Motion Picture Code.

The Code is notorious for its prohibition of the details of sexual
intimacy in or out of marriage, whether of fruition or frustration in
fact, its taboo of all explicit references to any of the biological functions
of animal or human characters. The prohibition also governs thematic
treatment of these details. Love must end in marriage; divorce is for-
bidden. Fitting punishment must follow a display of sin or crime.
There may be repentance in the motion pictures but no redemption.

Unnumbered writers novelists, lawyers, historians, clerics and poets
have protested that this "tattered philosophy of free will" contradicts
Christian ethics and the moral values the Code attempts to preserve;
but to no avail. Two men peculiarly suited to the task once attempted
to fix the responsibility for film censorship: Morris Ernst, this nation's
most prominent attorney in censorship litigation after the Ulysses
court case; and Pare Lorentz, producer and director of epochal docu-
mentary films. Their scrutiny, recorded in Censored: the Private Life of
the Movies (1930), led them time and again to "the gross, vapid illu-
sions of life contained in the ordinary movie."

Ernst arid Lorentz explained the operation of the Hayes office, and
discovered personal reasons for militant bigotry among dozens of indi-
vidual censors; but somehow the marriage of bigotry and expedience
was larger than the sum of discoverable details. Responsibility was
everywhere. They concluded: "The masses made the movie. It is a
nationalism; a sectionalism of thought, desire, frustration, written
large."

Exploiting this desire and frustration is the business of the movies.
Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950) is what Hortense Powder-

Hollywood Pay-Off 117

maker called her anthropological study of it, and the sum of all its
expedience she called a taboo against mankind. "No one goes to bat for
the human species; no one seems to care that mankind is presented
falsely, that the majority of movie portrayals are untrue." In all the
special pleas for doctors or Mexicans or ministers or Rotarians or
Negroes, "no worthy organization protests that human beings are
shown as passive, unfeeling robots." In a chapter called "Taboos" she
continues:

Man, according to Hollywood, is either completely good, or bad. His
personality is static, rarely showing any development either in growth
or regression. The villain is a blackened sinner who can do no good and
who cannot be saved; while the hero is a glamorous being, who can do
no wrong of his own volition, and who is always rewarded.

The movies manufacture stereotypes disguised as persons. They
rarely bother about complex human beings. This is a result of the
manufacturer's belief that he must gratify the consumers' wishes in
order to stay in business. But making profit entails more of a compro-
mise than merely expressing certain acceptable attitudes. To visualize
these attitudes on film means mutilating the literature from which they
are abstracted. There is no way around it.

The film form always emphasizes the prominent features of any
fiction. It simplifies the novel by caricaturing it. For the novel's system
of analogies the film substitutes an immediacy which the novel does
not have the reader becomes a viewer. But the film cannot accommo-
date the novel's complexity. When the producer uses the film to visual-
ize these unrealistic attitudes, therefore, he merely aggravates the film's
natural distortion of the novel.

Adapting a novel to the film means more than just converting it. The
first chapter of George Bluestone's Novels into Film ( 1957) concludes
on this. What the "filmist" adapts "is a kind of paraphrase of the
novel."

He looks not to the organic novel, whose language is inseparable from
its theme, but to characters and incidents which have somehow de-

1 1 8 The Denatured Novel

tached themselves from language and, like the heroes of folk legends,
have achieved a mythic life of their own.

One novelist has made a convincing case of this reasoning by turn
ing the usual process around: by building a novel out of a screenplay
and then explaining why. Budd Schulberg wrote the scenario for
Waterfront (1955) about racketeering among the longshoremen of
the Port of New York. Then, dissatisfied with the filmed result, he
wrote a novel based on the same story.

This film had every advantage of an intelligent production. The
author knew his subject and had something to say; he was allowed to
control the scenario; and the direction and the acting amplified his
story with sensitive understanding. It was a superb film and justly won
several Motion Picture Academy awards. But the film was not enough;
it told the truth of the lawless world of the waterfront, but not the
whole truth. Schulberg wanted to represent the dilemma of many
responsibilities for this lawlessness.

Schulberg's real subject was not the waterfront activity but the
awareness of it, which he described as "the deeper truth of inconclu-
siveness." His article, "Why Write It When You Can't Sell It to the
Pictures," in Saturday Review (September 3, 1955), explains why the
scenario could not accommodate his subject. The film, he said, has a
relentless force. It has its own tight logic which denies the ranging
kind of aesthetic experiences: "A film must act, a book has time to
think and wonder."

The film is an art of high points The novel is an art of high, middle,

and low points The film does best when it concentrates on a single

character. ... It tends to lose itself in the ramifications. ... It has no
time for what I call the essential digressions.

By "essential" digressions Schulberg meant the exploration of compli-
cated, contradictory characters and of their backgrounds, which only a
novel can afford.

Hollywood Pay-Off 1 19

The film must go from significant episode to more significant episode
in a constantly mounting pattern. ... It cannot wander as life wanders,
or pause as life always pauses to contemplate the incidental or the un-
expected.

The scenario visualizes a situation. The novel comprehends it. The
scenario abstracts the motion from that situation for its own subject,
because motion is the distinguishing property of the film. Everything
that a movie has to reveal depends on the uninterrupted movement of
its story.

This property of continuous motion determines the shape of the
story. Like the film on its winding spool the action must progress. Its
continuity derives from successive encounters which build some large
conflict whose resolution will end the film. Each encounter comprises
a scene, and the average feature film has time to develop only about
thirty scenes. Since each scene must advance the main conflict, there
is no room in the narrative, no space in the film, to explore any periph-
eral subject. There is no room for what Budd Schulberg calls the deeper
truth of inconclusiveness.

Abstracting motion from a novel means selecting and emphasizing a
conflict. This is standard procedure in adaptation. On the subject of
"Scenarios," Anita Loos's and John Emerson's Breaking into the
Movies (1921) still speaks for scores of other screenplay manuals. "In
choosing your story be sure it has the dramatic quality. It must not
be rambling; and it must have an element of conflict between opposing
factors. . . ." This manual describes the kind of conflict that will work:
between "a man and a woman, a woman and her Destiny, or simply
Good and Evil which leads up .to a crisis in which the matter is fought
out and finally settled."

No mistake about this conflict. The adversaries are obvious, and they
fight it out until they settle the matter. This recipe for a screenplay has
no room for the simultaneous analogies which develop and appraise
the subject. The screenplay reduces the novel to a single conflict which
it then renders into a sequence of visible scenes.

The deliberate stages of adaptation, like reduction gears in a ma-
chine, direct the energy to another plane for more efficient use. At the

1 2O The Denatured Novel

first stage the screen writer abstracts from the novel a synopsis of the
conflict. He then writes a present-tense narrative based on this synopsis,
which develops the traits and the motives of the characters with ref-
rence to the conflict. This is known as the "treatment," which is
enough to make almost any novelist shudder.

The next draft of the screenplay manuscript is the "continuity,"
which translates the "treatment" into the conventions of film repre-
sentation. This is the rendering of the novel. The more dramatic
material is turned into scenes, encounters between the adversaries that
will build the conflict. The rest of the novel is abandoned. Finally the
scenario or "shooting-script" refines the "continuity," dividing the
scenes into camera shots and providing transitions from one scene to
another. The sequence and variation of these camera shots will ac-
commodate the need to reveal one fact at a time, while creating sus-
pense over facts yet to come.

But this tidy description merely theorizes. Since the organization of
a film studio makes adaptation a collaborative affair, involving the
writer with his unit producer, the supervising producer, usually other
writers and then the director, many versions of each stage of the screen-
play manuscript modify the idea with which the writer began. Even
the finished scenario is not a public document but merely a set of in-
structions for the director, who must often make impromptu changes
as he shoots the film.

This whole collaborative business diminishes the writer's jurisdiction
over the story. What really cancels it is the editing, the process of or-
ganizing thousands of feet of exposed film into a narrative approxi-
mating the "continuity." Editing, or "cutting," literally establishes the
point of yiew of the story by selecting from among the camera shots.
It creates the film's presiding intelligence.

Editing can eliminate scenes, change their emphasis, or build new
scenes. It can change the entire story. Because it controls all of the
story's proportions, this process takes the place of the cohering pres-
ence which the author would furnish in a novel.

The process of "cutting" or editing is nearly as old as the narrative
film. Two years after Georges Melies filmed Cinderella with a station-
ary camera, as though it were a stage play, Edwin S. Porter's The Life

Holly wood Pay-Oft 1 2 1

of an American Fireman ( 1902 ) demonstrated the vitality of "cutting"
from one view of a continuous situation to another. By "cutting" Porter
could show the relevance of separate but simultaneous action, such as
the burning building in one place and the firemen racing toward it.
And by "cross-cutting," or showing alternate shots, he could create
suspense.

Porter's achievement was a triumph of production. He assembled a
narrative exclusively in the "cutting-room" from film footage accumu-
lated in other pictures. His achievement showed the advantages of
"cutting" for dramatic significance. Later D. W. Griffith, the industry's
greatest innovator, exploited this technique. One of his versions of the
"cross-cut," the venerable convention of the chase, has been a part of
nearly every feature film since Griffith's The Birth of a Nation ( 1914) .

"Cutting" stresses the immediacy of conflict and breeds suspense
over the outcome. At every stage it can surprise the viewer. It is a con-
vention that exploits all the tabloid advantages of the film, and dis-
tinguishes the film from all other narrative forms. This convention is
so dominating, in fact, that screenplays are normally written to ac-
commodate it.

The scenario capitalizes on the film's capacity for suddenly estab-
lishing a new point of view. Suspense can be heightened by the sudden
revelation of new facts, simply by "cutting" to another camera shot or
another scene. The story itself, therefore, must exploit the unexpected
turn of action, the sudden reversal, or an ironic twist. The device is
known in the trade as the "switcheroo" or the "gimmick" or the "top-
per." If its surprise is funny the device is a "yak"; if sentimental or
pathetic, it is a "bleeder."

The sudden twist of events pays off in shock value. The "gimmick"
is as old as story-telling despite its new slang, but the film's natural
facility for changing the point of view emphasizes the device of sudden
reversal. This is how the scenario really denies the novel. The abrupt
revelation becomes a disguise for the developing awareness which a
novel can represent but which a film does not have time for.

The "gimmick" is a sleight-of-hand. The scenarist can plant a fact
obscurely in the action and later reveal it as cause for the new turn
of affairs, and if the story is twisted quickly enough the shock will

122 The Denatured Novel

deny reasoning. The new turn of affairs may be arbitarary, even un-
believable, but the scenarist has only to remind the viewer that he has
seen the evidence before without realizing it. This is quite different,
however, from the novelist's problem of making the reader believe in
what happens.

The "gimmick" or the "switcheroo" is a way of passing off the coun-
terfeit values of movie fiction those lies which gratify the customers'
dreams. Because the sudden twist appears to solve a conflict so neatly
in its own terms, the device apparently justifies those terms: that peo-
ple are either good or bad and that, good or bad, they are all paid off
in kind. The "switcheroo" is a dream-device which the scenario ex-
ploits.

It would be going too far to say that the scenario and the novel ex-
clude one another but not much too far. The novel can be adapted to
the scenario only at the expense of its natural complexity. Sometimes
this is a good thing, when the novel is confused or too long for what it
has to say. The movie of James Jones's From Here to Eternity ( 1951 )
was far more persuasive than the novel. But this same attenuation
causes most scenarios to denature the novels they start with.

The film cannot render conflict without visualizing the adversaries,
nor can it visualize thought except by action; and at best the "gim-
mick" is a very stylized action. When a novel emphasizes inaction or
the futility of action, or when a character's adversary is not another
character or even a place that can be seen, the film is bound to distort
it. Yet this is precisely the kind of "unvisual" novel that has developed
since the end of the nineteenth century.

By 1900 the doctrine of determinism had begun to influence a few
American novelists such as Crane, Morris, Dreiser and London; and by
1920 it was widespread. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the
economy of Europe and America had seemed to outgrow any individ-
ual's ability to control or even to cope with it. What seemed an irre-
vocable loss to the individual needed explaining, and the doctrine of
"scientific" determinism, as it was called, attempted to explain it.

This doctrine was based on the layman's enthusiastic misunderstand-
ing of Darwinian biology and later of the psychology of Freud. It at-
tempted to explain the individual human being in terms of certain in-

Hollywood Pay-Off 123

tangible "forces" presumed to limit or determine him. In the fiction
which absorbed this irrational doctrine the individual had no efficacy.
Any action was futile because he could not even define his adversary.

However irrationally it may have developed, the extraordinary influ-
ence of "scientific" determinism on contemporary fiction is a fact. Al-
most every American novel after 1900 in some way acknowledges it.
This fact tends to make the contemporary novel intractable to any
abridgment or adaptation.

When a novel's conflict involves an adversary as shapeless as the
whole of society or as invisible as the hero's misguided notions of his
environment, the difference between the novel and its movie is likely
to be tremendous. When a novel presents an irresolvable situation,
with the hero suspended in circumstance, then the film narrative
(which demands the efficacy of action) actually contradicts the novel.
The well-known filmed versions of two deterministic novels Theo-
dore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and Ernest Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not (1937) show just such distortion.

The same kind of substitution made the better novel, An American
Tragedy, into the poorer film. This novel dramatizes the complex cir-
cumstances by which an individual's environment limits him. An
American Tragedy tells of a young man who plots the murder of his
mistress and then executes it in spite of himself. Nearly half the novel
describes the murder trial, which repeats the convicting evidence so
many times in so many ways that the book indicts an entire society for
the youth's crime. Like almost everyone else in this society the hero has
simply responded to the incentives of prosperity and social privilege.
The mass of the book is the massive evidence of this implacable situa-
tion. The novel has no "gimmick"; the pay-off is exactly what the
cumulating evidence promised it would be.

Dreiser's novel was first turned into a stage play, a four-act melo-
drama by Patrick Kearney, which concentrated primarily on the trial
scene. Then a moving picture based on both the novel and the play
was produced by Joseph Von Sternberg and released by Paramount in
1931. Except for the murder and the trial scenes almost no vestige of
the novel remained. The problem lay in defining the youth's adver-
sary. The mass of society was not filmable, so the producer imperson-

1 24 The Denatured Novel

ated it by law-enforcement officers. But this meant making the youth
the villain.

At the outset, therefore, the film reduced the novel to the pursuit
and trial of a murderer. Dreiser protested against this movie which, he
said, had turned the novel into a "tabloid murder story." Arguing that
the right to reproduce the novel did not convey the right to impoverish
it, the author sought a court injunction to prevent a theater in New
York City from exhibiting the film. The court's decision against the
author added a new irony to An American Tragedy.

The substitution of an obvious and resolvable conflict for the deter-
minist's view of experience distorted Hemingway's To Have and Have
Not beyond all recognition. The novel begins with a short story (it is
really a collection of short stories) about Harry Morgan, fisherman and
smuggler, whose luck, as his widow says, "went bad first in Cuba. Then
it kept getting right worse and worse until a Cuban killed him."

Titled "Spring," "Fall," and "Winter" there is no "Summer" in
this particular world the stories dramatize the circumstances of Har-
ry Morgan's losses: his fishing tackle, his arm, his boat and then his
life. Dying from a bullet wound in his stomach, Morgan mutters his
own realization of these circumstances: "Ain't got no hasn't got any
can't really isn't any way out." The author says it took the dying man a
long time to get it out and all his life to learn it.

To Have and Have Not is a series of brief glimpses at the lives of
men and women living around the harbor at Key West. The analogies
of these scenes suggest that somehow these have-nots all manage to
help circumstances deprive them of whatever they really want in life.
They all pathetically cherish some illusion of "having." A few, like
Harry Morgan and his wife, discover the inadequacy of the illusion, but
the rest never do. There is no other resolution.

This book denies the dream. But its author was famous reason
enough to make a film. There were a few small problems involved,
however, such as inventing a new conflict with new characters in a new
setting. The book's first episode, entitled "Spring," contained some
useful elements; and the scenarists abandoned the rest of the episodes.
Even so, this was not movie material. In this episode Morgan agrees to

Holly wood Pay-Off 125

smuggle twelve Chinamen from Cuba to the United States, then dou-
ble-crosses his employer by taking the money, murdering him, and land-
ing the cargo back in Cuba.

This was scarcely the illusion the movies wanted to sell, so the screen
writers made some changes. "Spring" became the summer of 1940, and
the locale was moved from Havana to Martinique, a French possession
then ruled by the Vichy government. This made Harry Morgan's tres-
passes acceptable. He could be hired by the French Underground to
'sabotage the puppet government (which would be represented, of
course, by a police inspector). It remained only to change Morgan's
cargo to a member of the Free French forces and to eliminate the
murder.

One other improvement amended an unfortunate omission from the
original episode. The scenarists wrote into the manuscript the part of
an American young woman stranded on the island. Profiting by these
changes, the film could easily represent an acceptable conflict: begin-
ning with intrigue, developing into a chase, and concluding with a
"switcheroo" which shifts the balance of power from the police in-
spector to Morgan. As Anita Loos put it: "A conflict of Good and
Evil which leads up to a crisis in which the matter is fought out and
finally settled."

The scenarists one of whom was William Faulkner showed great
ingenuity. They twisted Hemingway's story into a permissible conflict
that could be abruptly resolved. The scenario ignored the book's em-
phasis on "why" for an easier emphasis on "how." The smuggling of
human cargo, like the other episodes in the book, implies need to seek
reason for an apparently unmotivated crime, but the film removes
precisely this question. With the same change of emphasis the motion
picture reduced An American Tragedy to a single narrative of pursuit
and capture, omitting the complexities of why the murder had oc-
curred.

One of the properties of the novel form is the appraisal of conflict,
and both films effaced this property. But not all novels so stoutly resist
the "treatment" of the scenarist. If a novel emphasizes only "what"
and "how" to begin with, and if its conflict already resolves by a

1 26 The Denatured Novel

"switcheroo," then making a scenario is no trouble at all. One such
novel, which also happens to be the story of a murder, is James M.
Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice ( 1934) .

This novel tells how the passions of an itinerant bum and a married
woman lead them to murder her husband, and how this passion causes
the death of both murderers. The action turns on several sudden re-
versals. The first attempt at murder fails fortuitously, when it de-
velops that the man and woman were already under suspicion. After
their second, and successful, attempt the clever tactics of their defense
lawyer frees them. Next they are threatened by a blackmailer whom
they outwit. Finally, after they are clear of the law and with all evi-
dence destroyed, an auto accident kills the woman. This accident offers
evidence enough to convict the bum of her murder, even though there
was no murder.

The novel has no theme, no attitude toward its subject. It simply
tells how the murderers ironically escaped until they were ironically
punished. Only a few changes were needed for a screenplay that would
satisfy movie values. The film built up the character of the district at-
torney, making him the single adversary of the murderers. It simplified
the trial scenes and eliminated the guilt of insurance companies, which,
in the novel, profited by letting the murderers go. It added two new
scenes and new material to two others to make the heroine played by
Lana Turner more sympathetic, and to give her an added motive for
murder. It also eliminated some explicit love-making.

One reason for this faithful adaptation was that the author had al-
ready written his novel like a movie "continuity." Its sixteen chapters
are comprised of scenes. Within these scenes, short units sometimes
only eight or ten lines approximate camera shots. Thus, the book's
longest description of the wife, at the end of chapter one, efficiently
offers the only explanation of the mentality of her accomplice. "Ex-
cept for the shape she really wasn't any raving beauty, but she had a
sultry look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want
to mash them in for her/'

The book's point of view is a "gimmick." The first-person narrative
of how the murderers go free turns out to have been written in prison,
just before the narrator's execution for a crime he did not commit.

Hollywood Pay-Off 1 27

Presto! The story has been morally sound all along. In all its formal as-
pects The Postman was a scenario the moment it was published.

Cain has commented on the "legendary success" his stories have
made as films, saying "I have learned a great deal from pictures, mainly
technical things." By way of explaining this success, his preface to The
Butterfly (1947) describes the similarity of all his novels. He writes
of the wish that comes true, which seems to him a terrifying concept.
"I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden

box " The reader is carried along, he says, by the realization that the

characters cannot have their wish and survive. 'Thus, if I do any glanc-
ing, it is toward Pandora, the first woman, a conceit that pleases me,
somehow, and often helps my thinking."

All of Cain's novels stylize the Pandora legend. The trespasser ea-
gerly tells how he did it, then ends up lamely saying, "I see it all clearly
now, but I don't know why it happened." The hero says this just as he
is about to be punished. This pay-off makes everything square in the
movies, but it cannot camouflage the fact that the character is only a
mechanical monster.

An author's discussion of his own work is always welcome. But it is
not the most reliable document in the world, especially when the
work itself contradicts his own appraisal of it. For example, Cain's
preface to The Butterfly states: "I care almost nothing for what my
characters look like, being almost exclusively concerned with their in-
sides." By "insides" Cain obviously means those inner motives and
responses which make a character vital. But his characters are almost
never vital. They almost never have any "insides" except the literal
kind which occasionally and violently spill out.

All but one of Cain's novels are the same: a narrative without an at-
titude becomes a confession without a theme. All that change from
one story to another are the superficial authenticity of a setting and
the bewildering virtuosity of each hero's special knowledge. Be it op-
eratic singing or distilling corn liquor or dieting or picking lemons or
drilling for oil or mining silver or packaging frozen foods, each skill is
relevant to the crime. In a way, these books are accurate.

Past All Dishonor (1946) has the accuracy of an absolute vacuum.
It tells how a man's passion for a whore leads him to blackmail, steal

1 28 The Denatured Novel

and murder in order to get and keep her. The first thirteen chapters
tell how he goes about it and the fourteenth tells how he gets paid off.

The chapter sequence would indicate that Cain has already given
this novel the "treatment." ( i ) A man and woman meet and love; (2 )
she leaves; (3) he finds her and discovers she is a whore; (4) he sees
her professionally and she challenges him to pay the price; ( 5) he earns
money to meet the price, but loses it before payment; (6) succeeds in
earning more money; (7) but gets shot in the process; (8) so she nurses
him but will not accept his marriage proposal; (9) he hires himself
out as a legal gunman; and (10) kills her wealthy fiance, which (11)
makes her realize how much he loves her. (12) She responds to him at
the bottom of a deserted mine shaft, after which he discovers a lode of
silver ore; and together they plan to steal the money to buy the mine.
(13) Despite elaborate preparation their train robbery miscarries, and
they become fugitives; (14) in their hideaway, ever alert for pursuers,
he shoots and kills her by mistake and so ends his own life there.

Cain wrote on the dust jacket: "I have tried to put real human be-
ings before the reader, to explain, as plausibly as I can, how a gunman
got that way, what the prostitute was doing there, why the mine-owner
was a bit of a heel, and so on." It is painful to think that Cain could
have so condescended as to assume his readers would believe this. He
must have been talking about some other book.

A novel accretes meaning by its accumulation of analogies, but the
only thing Past All Dishonor accumulates is irrelevance. The hero kills
the heroine's finance because this unfortunate man has bought her
"like a prostitute" as the hero admits she is. He joins the Union Army
to escape punishment, then goes over the hill with the excuse that he is
really a Confederate sympathizer. And having already decided to rob
the train so that he and the heroine can live it up, he announces that
his theft will keep the treasure away from the Northern Army.

These tailor-made rationalizations would fit only a robot, and the
last chapter proves that they do. The hero says he has been sitting
around for two days and a night: "Writing down how it came about
that a boy that went to St. Anne's in Annapolis, and believed what he
heard there, should turn into a traitor, a killer and a thief. I don't know

Hollywood Pay-Oft 129

why." So he begins to speculate. "Falling in love with Morina, that had
something to do with it. But Virginia City had something to do with
it too." Then he really gets deep.

Maybe they were wrong about the devil, maybe he didn't move out
like they said he did. Maybe they just thought he did. Maybe he found
a new way to conjure. Maybe he found if you give people everything
they want, and nothing they ought to have, that'll wind them up in
hell, too. Anyhow, for me it's all over.

Cain said the movies never bought this book because he had made
the heroine a prostitute. This seems odd, since movieland can tempo-
rarily accommodate just about any heterosexual trespass so long as the
trespasser will be killed anyway. The author explained himself in order
to emphasize that he had never toned down a novel in order to court
the favor of a motion picture producer. He must be right in his reason-
ing about the prostitute, since this novel is constructed exactly like
every book he did sell to the movies.

They all rely on the same "switcheroo." In "Double Indemnity" (in
Three of a Kind, 1943) an insurance claims-adjuster commits a perfect
murder, and might have collected the insurance money of the deceased
but for his falling in love with the victim's daughter. This dilemma he
solves by suicide. Also in Galatea (1953) the narrator tells how his in-
volvement with another man's wife precipitates violent death. This
time the husband is the criminal, and the narrator tells of virtue re-
warded as well as villainy defeated. Discovered and pursued by the
husband, who is killed in his attempt to kill them, the lovers escape.
But the lovers must stand trial for his murder,

The sudden reversal of Galatea takes place in court. Just the oppo-
site from the trial scene in The Postman (where perverted evidence
secures the wrong verdict), the lovers are acquitted because the incon-
sistencies of the truth manage to contradict the circumstantial evi-
dence against them. This use of the "gimmick" recalls an earlier con-
fessional, "The Embezzlers," published in Three of a Kind, also about

1 30 The Denatured Novel

the narrator's involvement with the innocent wife of a criminal hus-
band. In this one, however, the hero's innocence becomes so hopelessly
compromised that he must be saved by an act of author.

No matter what the twist, it always pays off in the same way. The
hero of Serenade (1937) has a liaison with a Mexican woman until she
kills the man who has loved him. Since the pay-off eliminates the mur-
derer who has eliminated the pervert, the novel excuses everyone's in-
dulgence in the lurid details along the way. This is what satisfies movie
values. The message on the paperback cover of the novel announces
that "Cain is a story-teller first and last everything else in his work is
stripped to the basic, cinematic action."

No nonsense here about the novel's complexity. The inside blurb
of i95opaperbond edition announces that Serenade "has the inevitable
toughness, the swiftness of pace, the action stripped to essentials. . . ."
But the novel belies the claim. Precisely because "the action is stripped
to essentials" there is nothing "inevitable" about it. What is "stripped"
is the subjective existence of the characters, the thought and feeling
which fashions all response and gives it significance.

It is Cain's stylization, not the Pandora legend, that fails; there is
nothing about Pandora that forbids thought and feeling. In fact, both
the best and the least of Cain's novels stylize the same legend. One is
believable and the other is not. The least of these novels, Loves Lovely
Counterfeit (1942), tells how a stool-pigeon uses the influence of his
mistress to double-cross the racketeer who employs him, so that he
can become a racketeer himself. Like the narrator of Double Indemnity
this hero gets trapped by falling in love with the right woman at the
wrong time. The irony fails because the hero is not believable anyway.

Cain later explained (in The Butterfly preface) that Love's Lovely
Counterfeit was the only novel he had written with "any expectation of
pleasing" a motion picture producer. "I thought, and still think, Love's
Lovely Counterfeit ... is a slick plot for a movie, and I executed it well
enough." It is slick, all right. The novel's final "switcheroo" involves
the dying criminal's attempt to make his confession outside the juris-
diction of the law to beat the rap but to satisfy the movies. But even
the movies would not buy this one.

What makes The Butterfly (1947) the best of Cain's novels is that

Hollywood Pay-Off 131

the hero has believably fooled himself about his trespasses. Brought up
in the hill country of Kentucky and West Virginia, he preaches the
literal justice of the Old Testament. The deeds he performs in token of
his fundamentalist faith, however, are sins by the same token. This
novel is more persistently sordid than any of the others, involving mul-
tiple possibilities of incest, bastardy, cuckolding and murder. But
when this hero dies, with the usual confession, he is believable because
he has agonized all along over his impossible compromise with God.

The only one of Cain's novels which explicitly preaches the justifica-
tion of its hero is also the most immoral. This is The Moth (1948),
which tells of the hero's twenty-three-year exile from home. During
these wanderings he has committed armed robbery and escaped un-
punished; but this is only the half of it. He had originally left home
under the accusation of seducing his fiancee's little sister. As it turns
out, however, his innocence of the seduction somehow countenances
the unpunished crime which he later did commit.

The last four chapters of this novel which go through the motions of
trial and sentence would pass for a parody of expedience. They are also
a good blueprint of Cain's fiction. The prodigal son and his father
agree on a plan whereby the son will write down his experiences, which
the father will then edit and evaluate. "I've no gift for words, Dad,"
says the hero, "I'd tell the what and leave out the why." which the
book has already done for twenty-six chapters.

Then the father pronounces a long judgment, the heart of which is:
"What, after all, has loused you, as you put it? Me? Yourself? Circum-
stances? All three to some extent. But mostly the time in which you
Jived a calendar." whatever that means. But the author gets away
with this double-talk because it excuses one crime on the strength of
the hero's innocence of another. As in so many of Cain's novels the
moralizing is an accessory after the fact the real fact having been an
unbelievable character in the first place.

It seems incredible that Cain could write: "I care almost nothing
for what my characters look like, being almost exclusively concerned
with their insides." And from his preface to The Butterfly it is apparent
that he thought he had not sold out to the movies. His novels, how-
ever, do not support his opinions.

1 32 The Denatured Novel

Perhaps Cain is like most writers who have learned how to satisfy
the movies and have convinced themselves that the film is really more
persuasive than the novel. This has fooled a good many novelists be-
fore him. Back in the early days when Hollywood was beginning to buy
novels, Jack London mouthed this prejudice. "Visualization is every-
thing for the teacher/ 7 he was quoted as saying in Moving Picture
World (January 31, 1914). "I love to teach, to transmit to others the
ideas and impressions in my own consciousness."

So far so good. London had just seen the movie of his novel The Sea-
Wolf (1904). But even as London explained himself, he lost out. "I
am a realist and essentially a picture writer. In writing a story I always
keep in mind these two motives; first, I want to make the details so
plain that he who runs may read, and then there is the deeper underly-
ing psychological motive."

Notice the afterthought. This is just what James M. Cain's last
chapters unwittingly burlesque. As for the priority of motives, "that
he who runs may read" determines the filmed adaptation of most
novels.

Ever since Jack London's opinion, some forty years ago, the scenario
method of fiction has continually proved the congeniality of novel and
film at the novel's cost. The movie reduces the complexities of a
novel to a conflict, then counterfeits the complexities by visual tricks.
When these tricks are used to justify the expedient morals of popular
amusement, then the novel becomes something else again; it becomes
just another story.

Chapter VI

Instant Fiction

INEXPENSIVE paperbound books, or "paperbacks," now comprise the
largest share of the book trade's retail volume. Even in a business notor-
iously built on exceptions and contradictions, the paperback stands
out. The presentation of the inexpensive paperback customarily con-
tradicts the book itself; it negates the distribution system which de-
livers the book to the buyer; and it impugns the very claims it makes to
the purchaser. Even the marketing of the paperback novel denies the
reading process; in fact, the publishers have made it possible to not
read almost every paperback novel they print.

They have achieved this extraordinary feat by means of the package
itself, which has created a startling image of American fiction during
the past twenty years. This image is easy to see. I find it, for instance,
in the packaging of several hundred novels 302 to be exact pub-
lished in soft covers during the last twenty years. This is about seven
per cent of the more than 4,000 fiction titles now in paperback editions.

There is nothing scientistic about this shelf-list of books (or even
scientific); it is no controlled sample from specified retail outlets. It
contains merely the novels I have bought from time to time with small
change. But it does happen to represent ninety-seven American writers,
whose works were originally published during the last hundred years;
and it includes the imprints of twelve major American publishers of in-
expensive paperback books: Ace, Avon, Ballantine, Bantam, Crest,
Dell, Gold Medal, Permabooks, Pocket Books, Popular Library, Pyra-
mid and Signet. It is a fair representation of contemporary American
fiction.

1 34 The Denatured Novel

The image created by these paperbacks is primarily on their covers,
conveyed by a kind of "outside idiom" which comes across in a hurry
for efficient non-reading. Just seventy-one adjectives describe all of
these books, but by a declining ratio. There are forty-nine adjectives
on the first hundred covers (arranged alphabetically by author), seven-
teen new ones on the next hundred, and only five new adjectives on
the covers of the rest.

A frequency list of the words is even more revealing. Twenty-three
adjectives are repeated more than five times, and a dozen words are so
insistent that the image of this fiction is incontestable. These novels
are "moving," "brilliant," "dynamic" and "compelling." They are
"gripping," "graphic" and "fascinating." They are "emotion-charged"
and "blood-stirring," and occasionally "drum-tight." But more than
anything else they are "poignant" and "powerful." They are about
equally "compassionate" and "brutal"; and some often the less ex-
pensive ones are both.

These adjectives keep company with picturesque verbs. These novels
were not written, for instance by and large they were "carved." They
were "carved from the frontier," they were carved "from the city" and
"from the past," they were "carved from the human heart." These
carvings are about persons "caught in a web" usually a "web of des-
tiny," occasionally a web of "stark destiny." Moreover, these novels
"score." They score by being "merciless," "stinging," "biting" or
"fearless." And they "speak out" too. But for every "outspoken" novel,
seventeen are "frank" and three are "utterly frank." The subject of this
candor is variously "bawdy," "daring," "intimate," "racy," "stark" and
"unnatural." Searching for a new sensation, one publisher has even
labeled the contents of his book as "TURGID!" which is certainly
being "utterly frank."

What one discovers about these "emotion-packed," "action-charged"
books by Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Mickey Spillane, Frank
Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Erie Stanley Gardner, Thomas Wolfe, John
Marquand, William Faulkner and ninety-one others is that they are
apparently all the same: a fact, were it true, which would save everyone
a great deal of time. How all these novels suddenly got to be the same
in the last twenty years is something of a mystery, until you begin to

Instant Fiction 135

inspect the economics of paperback publishing. Then it all becomes
clear along with the fact that the reader's good faith and the book
trade's ultimate good intentions have been contradicted in the paper-
backs more efficiently than ever before.

These inexpensive editions are the latest version of an old publish-
ing idea: cheap books in large volume. This newest version dates from
1939, when Robert DeGraff began the Pocket Books series with thirty-
four titles whose sales totaled five hundred thousand copies in the first
year. After World War II the market for cheap books increased in
every way: in new titles, in gross sales, and in the number of authors
and publishers represented. After the notoriety of a Congressional in-
vestigation of pornography in 1952, the steadily increasing sales of the
paperbacks made good news copy.

In 1953, when some twenty publishers sold more than two hundred
and fifty million copies of more than one thousand titles, the nation's
press began to acknowledge what everyone called the revolution in
books. Whether one pointed with pride or viewed with alarm, it be-
came fashionable to talk about books as a mass medium, and to ponder
the "cultural gain" or loss which resulted from it. In 1955 current
titles were first cataloged. There are now more than six thousand
paperback titles in print. As early as 1956 the best estimates of the
size of this revolution placed the cumulative sales at two billion copies
of more than twelve thousand titles. The bookkeeping has not yet
caught up with the facts.

Only a few facts are needed, however, to assess the effect of the
paperbacks on the novel and its readers. At first these editions were
reprints, particularly of fiction. For the first fifteen years of this revolu-
tion nine out of every ten paperbacks were novels and more than half
of them still are. During this same period the number of novels issued
in trade editions, compared to the total number of trade books, has
proportionately decreased. To all intents, therefore, the paperbacks fur-
nish the fiction market.

But as long ago as 1950 the shrinking supply of novels in the public
domain or on publishers' backlists forced the reprinters to search for
other sources of supply. They began to publish non-fiction; they pub-
lished volumes of short stories (a product with which trade publishers

1 36 The Denatured Novel

had never succeeded) ; and by a variety of schemes involving both trade
publishers and film companies, the reprinters began to publish original
manuscripts. By some lapse of reasoning, however, the publishers dis-
guised the appearance of these various products in such a way that each
new book began to look like every other.

Contemporary publishers have not wholly intended this, any more
than their predecessors, seventy-five or a hundred years ago, intended
to ruin the markets which even then existed for cheap books. In the
1840*5 inexpensive reprints disguised as subscription items became so
flagrant that Congress adjusted the postal laws and put an end to
profiteering through low mailing rates. Again in the iSyo's cheap books
abounded, but with benefit of piracy. For nearly twenty years, until
Congress passed the International Copyright Act of 1891, the paper-
bound reprints increased to a point where they totaled one-third of all
the books produced in the United States. But cheap books miscarried
again. Even before the copyright legislation, competition had forced
reprinters to issue such shoddy products that they lost their market.

This current revival of cheap books exploits some old economic
conditions in a new way. The paperbacks are distributed not as books
but as magazines. They are produced consequently like magazines and
retailed like magazines. They even look like magazines, and the new
readers they have found are generally the people who used to read
magazines instead of books. The decline of the pulp magazines after
the onset of the paperbacks is one symptom of this new readership.
Another symptom is the high sale, in paperback editions, of novels
which had never sold very well in the bookstores.

The most convincing claim of discovering a new audience can be
made by Erskine Caldwell's paperback publisher. Of the forty million
copies of Caldwell's books sold to date, thirty-five million have been
paperbacks; and most of the rest including hard-cover reprints and
foreign editions were sold subsequent to the paperbound edition
( 1946) of God's Little Acre (1933; 1946) . This appeared thirteen years
after its original trade edition (1933), and the reprint sales now total
more than seven million copies. By means of paperback editions Cald-
well has sold more copies of more novels than any other writer in the
world.

Instant Fiction 137

This makes books a big business or Caldwell's books, at any rate.
But how many millions make a mass audience? Judging by magazine
sales, for instance, the paperback reprints have not yet arrived. More
than six million people buy one issue of Life or Reader's Digest nearly
as many as have bought God's Little Acre in the past fourteen years. In
television, sponsors have canceled programs which have reached as
many as twenty-five million viewers at once. Gross income is another
way of estimating the mass market, and by this standard the average
paperback novel is a tiny venture compared to the average Hollywood
film.

For every book a trade publisher sells, nevertheless, the reprinter sells
twelve or fifteen. By book trade standards whether by cost, sales reve-
nue, or number of purchasers the paperbound books are on their way
to a mass market. Making books for millions instead of thousands has
forced publishers to face the vexing problem of preserving the book's
individuality. It is the problem of resisting the compromise of mere
public acceptance, the compromise of conformity and therefore medi-
ocrity.

The economic organization of paperback publishing creates great
pressures toward the conformity of individual books. Reprinting is
basically a distributing operation, and the distribution of paperbacks
depends crucially on middlemen who can afford no interest in litera-
ture except as a commodity. The system really limits the reprint pub-
lisher.

The reprinter stands between the trade publisher and the national
distributor who sells to wholesalers. His contract with the trade pub-
lisher gives him the right to reprint a title and to sell it in certain mar-
kets for a limited time at a specified price. For this privilege he pays
royalties. On a book retailing for fifty cents the reprinter usually
pays two cents each for the first one hundred and fifty thousand
copies and a cent-and-a-half thereafter. To secure this contract in the
the first place he has had to guarantee a larger advance against royalties
than any of his competitors has offered.

The reprinter begins, therefore, by assuming some of the trade pub-
lisher's risk. He prints his own edition, realizing that no matter what
his break-even figure, he must sell at least thirty thousand copies a year

1 38 The Denatured Novel

in order to make up the expense of distributing the book. He then con-
signs the book to wholesalers who warehouse the book and distribute it
to retail stores. From the sale of a hypothetical twenty-five-cent book
the reprint publisher will ultimately receive fifteen or sixteen cents.
Since his cost (for manufacturing, overhead, royalties and shipping)
runs to twelve cents a copy, he can count on a net profit of three or
four cents but only after absorbing the cost of unsold copies; and this
cost is exorbitant. It takes the profit from eight sales to recover the cost
of one return. The cost of over-sales has put dozens of houses out of
business.

Everyone who handles the book, from publisher to retailer, works on
a narrow margin and depends for his profit on a high volume of sales;
but the risk belongs only to the reprint publisher. This curious state of
affairs stems from the marriage of convenience which reprint publishers
and local wholesalers made during the early years of the present revival
of the paperbacks. The reprinter could not afford to distribute his
books by mail; and magazine wholesalers, during the War, were short
of magazines and needed something to sell. Each needed the other,
but the method of wholesaling magazines had been established long
before the reprinter came along. The wholesalers did not buy the books,
any more than he would buy magazines. He would merely perform for
a fee the service of distributing them.

The system is even more limiting to the reprinter. Magazines go out
of date; new issues replace old ones. To the wholesalers nothing is quite
so dead as the magazine he distributed last week or the book, for that
matter. If last week's book is still in the retailer's rack when he makes
his next call, the wholesaler withdraws it in favor of another title, pos-
sibly issued by some other reprinter. The publisher must therefore
continually issue new titles to replace slow sellers. This system puts a
high premium on predictable books. Each new book must offer or
appear to offer what the last book offered, only more of it. This fact
conditions the editorial policy of all paperback publishers.

Each book must appear to have the salable qualities of its predeces-
sors. Since the book must compete for attention with magazine covers
as well as with other books, it must also advertise itself on the retailer's
racks. The advertising is therefore calculated to make the book stand

Instant Fiction 1 39

out but conventionally. It must demonstrate the same appeal but
more blatantly, which explains those few frenetic adjectives on all the
eyecatching covers, haranguing the customer like a sideshow barker.
The aim is to shock, but shock is only a symptom of the affliction.

The real disorder in the paperback venture is the steady demise of
the publisher's editorial prerogative. (The quality paperbacks, on the
other hand, retailed as books and not as magazines for thousands in-
stead of millions of readers are a different matter. ) What has hap-
pened to the inexpensive paperbacks whether they cost twenty-five
cents or seventy-five cents is that the means of distributing a new
book now determines what the book shall be. It is of no use to exhort
the reprinter to study the needs and tastes of his readers, if, in order to
stay solvent, he must continue to produce books which imitate other
books with a proven sales value.

You can sense how much the editorial responsibility has been viti-
ated, by recalling the trade publisher's part in this venture. As originally
conceived, the inexpensive reprint business repackaged and redistrib-
uted books already published. The trade publisher had already taken
editorial responsibility for the book, and his part of the deal consisted
merely of assigning certain rights to the reprinter offering the highest
down payment. Reprinters still consider it worth while to maintain the
appearance of this arrangement, but the nature of the transaction has
changed to the point where the trade publisher (desperately needing
subsidiary income) now offers a service to the reprinter. The trade pub-
lisher knows what kind of books the wholesaler can and cannot sell; if
his present list does not include such fare his next list probably will.

Ways and means vary. Before accepting a first novel a publisher cus-
tomarily solicits bids from reprinters, attempting to find a partner in
the venture. With an author's second novel the publisher will cer-
tainly consult the house, which reprinted the first one. Literary agents
play it both ways: offering a manuscript to the trade publisher, having
first arranged for the reprint rights; or selling it to the reprinter, who
then finds a trade house who will bring it out or, in trade talk,
"famous it up." For the sake of appearances you can argue either way
about this and be right. On the one hand, the trade publisher occasion-
ally gets desirable manuscripts he would not otherwise have had. On

140 The Denatured Novel

the other hand, short of a veto, he wields no editorial influence. In fact,
the trade publisher becomes the reprinter.

Appearances aside, it makes sense to share the printing cost of a
book's several editions, particularly when the cost can be measurably
reduced by first printing the pages of the paperback, photo-enlarging
them for the pages of the hard-cover edition, and then printing the
trade edition by offset. This saves the cost of a second set of printing
plates. Although stored and later distributed as a reprint, under this
common arrangement the paperback is literally the original.

This confusion of traditional distinctions, and therefore of editorial
responsibility, has been further blurred by the economic organization
of reprinting firms. In some cases the paperback reprinter is actually a
magazine company, and this company's distributing organization
handles what its subsidiary "publishes." Fawcett Publications, a maga-
zine house, owns Gold Medal books. Reprints bearing the "Popular
Library" imprint are published by the subsidiary of Pines Publications,
a producer of magazines and comic books.

Sometimes the imprint of a book bears the title not of the publisher
but of the distributing organization, as with Dell books; but the edito-
rial responsibility in this case actually belongs to the manufacturer,
Western Printing and Lithography Company, which primarily prints
magazines and comic books. The control of another firm, Bantam
Books, is even more complicated. This house was organized in 1945 by
Grosset and Dunlap, a hard-cover reprinter, and by the Curtis Publish-
ing Company, the magazine publisher which distributes the Bantam
products. But one of the partners, Grosset and Dunlap, was already
jointly owned by four trade publishers and the Book-of-the-Month
Club.

No matter what his auspices, the reprinter has had to deal more and
more in original manuscripts. The wholesaler's replacement of old titles
every few weeks creates a continual need for new ones. The supply of
published novels can no longer meet these needs. Backlists have been
depleted and the competition for current wares has driven the prices
up; so, to cut costs and to gain some measure of control, the reprinter
publishes original manuscripts. "Originals," in fact, now represent a
third of the titles published by reprint houses, and this percentage will
increase.

Instant Fiction 141

This situation offers certain advantages to the author. He gets a bet-
ter contract from the reprint publisher, retaining all rights but those to
the paperbound edition. He keeps all the royalties too, for there is no
trade publisher to share them. It also aids the unknown writer, whose
first novel might not otherwise have been published. A writer without
a reputation is often a liability to the trade publisher but no problem to
the reprinter, whose customers are not impressed by reputations any-
way.

The reprinter has more control over his product when his product is
an "original." He customarily offers an advance on a fragmentary
manuscript several chapters and an outline reserving final payment
until its completion. This is one way of prescribing fiction, although
publishers never relish discussing this delicate subject. They prefer to
point out merely that writing novels to order rarely proves to be com-
mercially successful. "We don't actually commission fiction," says one
reprint publisher, "because writers are better than we are at spotting
trends."

Say it however you wish, the author of the paperback original must
cut his cloth to fit the pattern. The theory of bulk sales with narrow
margins of profit dictates the need for novels which will sell quickly.
There are specifications for this, and they are fundamentally like the
requisites of magazine fiction. This is no mere coincidence. By design
both products sell quickly, by the same means, and to large numbers
of customers.

Like magazine fiction, the paperback novel should offer strong story
quality, with a prominent conflict and a plot which resolves this con-
flict by some surprising twist. Also in the manner of the magazines, the
paperback must avoid offending recognized political, religious or civic
groups; it must avoid esoteric or learned references, and what publish-
ers condescendingly call "literary" style. Without the sponsorship of
advertising the paperback can indulge the reader more explicitly in
violence and sexual activity, although this is often only superficial to
the novel. The appeal of the paperback, as one reprinter puts it, is
"basic approach to basic problems."

Regardless of the book, this is what the reprinter promises the cus-
tomer. All over its covers, and inside as well, he strains to show the
book's extravagance. What he accomplishes by this is the limitation of

142 The Denatured Novel

each title to the mean level of all the others. The lie is terribly dam-
aging to the book and to the reader. The random sample of 302 Ameri-
can novels, which launched this discussion, raises the question of a
monolithic literature. When a novel succeeds on the retailer's racks its
cover copy accurately prescribes the specifications for its successors.

This inflated "outside idiom" actually limits what it describes. The
language celebrates excess for its own sake. What other message is
there except the glut of excess on the paper cover of Meyer Levin's
novel, Compulsion (1956; 1958)? This copy promises "increasing hor-
ror and suspense" about "the crime of the century"; it proclaims the
novel and its subject "sensational," "best-selling," "spellbinding," "en-
tertaining," "shocking" (twice), "enlightening," "fascinating," "graph-
ic," "absorbing," "gripping," "provocative" and "startling." "Stun-
ning" which does not appear describes the total effect.

There is yet more to the matter. The publishers themselves have
raised the question of literary excellence by plastering testimonies to
that effect all over their books. Carefully quoted, these claims are at-
tributed to "critics," which is what a publisher calls book reviewers
whose testimony happens to suit him. This testimony appears in the
language of qualified superlatives. "Masterpiece" and "Classic" per-
form heavy duty, carefully hedged by disclaimers such as "one of the
greatest" or "among the greatest," "perhaps the greatest of all time,"
or "in the nation" or "in the century." So-and-so, an unknown author
who cannot yet qualify for greatness of this magnitude appears instead
as a "master story teller" or merely "at his best."

What palls is the utter misrepresentation of a book's contents. The
paperback edition of Ernest Hemingway's novel Across the River and
into the Trees (1950; 1950) is really a collector's item. It carries Ten-
nessee William's affidavit that this is "the best ... the finest thing that
Hemingway has done." But this laughably bad judgment is a mere
amateur's try compared to John O'Hara's absurd statement, also
quoted on the cover, that Hemingway is "the outstanding author out
of the millions who have lived since 1616." When it comes to handing
out literary credentials no publisher has yet matched this package, but
they are all trying.

The affidavit of literary association on the cover is used to excuse or

Instant Fiction 143

to justify the book. It also braces up the reader; it is that little extra
something which helps the tourist pretend he is traveling first class.
The reprint package of Frederic Wakeman's Shore Leave ( 1944; 1948)
typically flouts such big-time literary talk. This book has "some of the
wise-cracking wit of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises" "It's like an
almond-bitter Farewell to Arms; a more desperate Hemingway in a
more tragic age/' About the hero: "All by himself he made up a lost
generation."

The blurb in the paperback edition of Erskine Caldwell's God's
Little Acre likens the hero's lusting after his daughter-in-law to the
"Song of Solomon." We are told of Tobacco Road ( 1932; 1947*!) that
Jeeter Lester is "heroic in his ineradicable love of the soil, his refusal
to leave it for the superior living conditions of the town and its indus-
trial civilization." Something has suddenly happened to the concept of
the hero after several thousand years. Every notion of heroism which
the modern world has inherited involves awesome power, size or glory;
and Jeeter Lester violates every one of these qualities. The blurb ac-
companying Georgia Boy (1943; 1950) similarly patronizes its prede-
cessors. This is asserted to be a classic of American boyhood which will
stand beside Hemingway's "My Old Man" and Mark Twain's Huckle-
berry Finn. But the fact that Georgia Boy has nothing to do with the
juvenile character who tells the stories dismisses the book from this
particular hall of fame.

The book publisher has an impeccable answer to this sort of caviling.
After all, he did not write these critical claims, he merely displays them.
They are all carefully quoted. Nor is there anything new about the ex-
travagance of book reviewing. He is right, of course.

The low state of book reviewing in America has always been attacked
by writers, even by reviewers themselves. Nearly 150 years ago John
Neal interrupted his novels to sermonize on this subject. E. A. Poe
made capital and good copy of incompetence and knavery in book
reviewing. The whole matter of literary exploitation so bothered Henry
Thoreau that in editing the recollections of his Concord River journey
he inserted the note that "books are for the most part willfully and
hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined."
This sounds like the disdainful comments of Edmund Wilson, Irving

144 The Denatured Novel

Babbitt, and O. H. Cheney. Testimonial advertising always attempts
to manufacture masterpieces where none exist.

The contemporary reprinter, however, has contributed something
new to this malpractice an entire tabloid package which distorts more
efficiently than ever before. Comparison by superlative soon exhausts
its subject. When such comparison involves two billion packages, more
or less, then who can tell from these packages what the contents of any
one of them might be? How shall the reader know his purchase? All of
these novels look the same a new kind of instant fiction packaged in
two billion compelling sequels to one another.

The reprint publisher concentrates on a quick sale to the customer.
The book must sell itself, must catch the attention and lead it rapidly
into the story. Its whole presentation builds the habit of buying on
impulse, and one way to do this is to promise quick sensation. In this
way the reprinter has achieved a large volume of sales, but not neces-
sarily large numbers of customers. As every trade publisher knows, sen-
sation can always be sold to a constant fringe-market, no matter what
the subject of the book. Despite this, publishers usually find it better
business to slant books toward the wider market of persons who feel
more comfortable with the accepted mores. It is just possible, however,
that the reprint packages which sell sensation only are purchased by
this same fringe of buyers over and over again.

Even assuming that they know their customers, the reprinters (like
the trade publishers) have missed the distinction between book buyers
and book readers. They have successfully exploited the truism that
shallow books catch on quickly, or not at all. But by selling all their
novels as instant fiction, they penalize those books which have some
complexity. It takes more time to read the novel which demands some
reasoning collaboration; therefore, it takes such a novel more time to
be talked about and to sell. But the paperback's entire presentation
denies this fact. It does so by always encouraging the buyer to expect
entertainment without effort.

The presentation usually makes this indiscriminate promise by
abridging the contents of the novel into a preview, usually printed on
the book's first page but sometimes on the back cover. This preview
tells the reader what to look for. It stresses the "becoming" movement

Instant Fiction 145

of the novel, stating a conflict and raising the question of how the novel
will resolve it. The preview insists on some unique excess within this
conflict which makes it different from everyday experience and gives
it news value.

The preview is journalistic. Like the news story, which telegraphs its
climax, the preview keeps the reader going. It even looks like a news
story, from the headline and the lead sentence featuring the unique-
ness, to the narrative of events, and finally to the occasional details.
This newsworthy preview ideally fits those novels which have nothing
more to offer than the resolution of a unique series of events.

The preview in the paperback edition (1953) of John O'Hara's Ap-
pointment in Samarra (1934; 1 9$3), f r instance, gives a faithful ac-
count of this novel. After a 24-point headline which proclaims a "Fatal
Flaw," the lead sentence identifies the hero who passionately loves his
wife, but whose character is "flawed by a destructive weakness." Three
sentences then paraphrase the action:

In the brief three-day span of this tense ironic novel, Julian's life
moves swiftly to its inevitable tragic climax. His downfall begins at a
country club dance when he throws a highball in the face of Gibbs-
ville's wealthiest, most powerful man. A drunken encounter with a
nightclub singer in a gangster's roadhouse lends its swift momentum,
and from a disgraceful brawl in a fashionable men's club through a
final, bitter quarrel with his wife, Julian's life spirals downward with
dizzying speed.

Another sentence informs the reader how quickly it all happens. And a
final statement testifies that the novel is a "modern classic." From
beginning to end this preview expands its facts like a news story.

The newsworthy resume stresses the action and disallows its impli-
cations. But because novels differ from one another precisely by these
implications, the monolithic preview usually distorts a novel. The
paperbound edition (1954) of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel, The
Ox-Bow Incident (1940; 1954), for example, distorts by default. In the
customary sequence of headline, lead sentence, synopsis and "expert"
literary testimony, it clarifies the story's news value. This is "a powerful

1 46 The Denatured Novel

novel of the American West"; it is "an unforgettable tale that blazes
with the strength and vigor of its setting"; and it is "a searing and ex-
citing story of honest men of action who let their mistaken fury lead
them to violence and injustice."

This generality scarcely suggests the novel's real subject, which is the
inadequacy of mere virtue in the world. At a kangaroo court, a posse
of ranchers has tried and executed three innocent men. Following the
"shocking outdoor trial" where the preview of the narrative stops
the man who has clearly tried to prevent the execution now astonish-
ingly takes the responsibility for it. Convinced of the suspect's inno-
cence, he argues, he has nevertheless joined the posse unarmed, pur-
posely to avoid a showdown with its leader. With this confession the
novel then focuses on the other men who have given their frightened
consent, as they become aware of their own irresponsible righteousness.
These implications of the execution, which the novel is all about, are
not even whispered in the preview.

The paperback presentation of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's
Men (1946; 1951 ) "A GREAT NOVEL . . . about great corruption"
similarly overlooks what that novel is all about. The preview features
the unscrupulous politics of Willie Stark, who forces one of his em-
ployees to double-cross a personal friend. From the moment he does so,
"the story moves steadily to its tremendous climax." In this way the
preview alludes to Stark's assassination. But the novel's real subject is
the pathology of Willie Stark's power, and it is dramatized through the
self-realization of a few well-meaning people who, for convincing per-
sonal reasons, have sold out to this man.

Self-comprehension is what a novel can best represent, but this is
just what the previews omit. Any fiction appraises experience simply by
resolving a conflict, but the tremendous possibility of the novel lies in
the breadth it has in which to make analogies to this conflict, such as
the shared problems of the various ranchers and their victims in The
Ox-Bow Incident, or of the several employees of Willie Stark in All
the King's Men. The previews commonly emphasize the action for its
own sake, but this merely advertises a book's similarity to all others.

If a preview were to emphasize the action with regard to its particu-
lar implications, on the other hand, it would advertise the book's indi-

Instant Fiction 147

viduality. The difference would be more than a matter of altering
words here and there; it would mean changing the preview's point of
view to accommodate the book itself instead of the reader's assumed
tastes. And this is all the difference in the world.

See how obviously the reprinter limits what the novelist offers in the
first paperback edition of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts ( 1933) .
After a screaming headline ("Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, HELP ME . . ./
HELP ME . . ./ HELP ME, PLEASE!!!") the preview informs the
reader that this is the lovelorn column of a big city newspaper, "and
when 'Miss Lonelyhearts 7 turns out to be a man the result is bound
to be both explosive and shocking." But the shock and explosiveness
have nothing to do with the gender in the title; the novel's opening
sentence settles that. The point of the book is not that Miss Lonely-
hearts "turns out to be a man," but that he turns out to be a man with
a Christ-complex, whose inability to cope with human misery out-
rages and destroys him. The novel so far exceeds the reprinter's dis-
torted promise that the preview might better be placed between the
covers of another book. In any case, it has been dropped from the later
printings of this one.

This limiting journalism of the reprinters even extends to tabloid
reading-guides on the cover itself, to help the reader make up his mind.
Thus, the retitled paper edition The Night Before Dying (1955) of
Robert M. Coates's Wisteria Cottage (1948; 1955), saves the reader
time:

Louisa haughty, love-hungry with claws of steel/ Elinor warm, allur-
ing, and very, very soft/ Florence shrewd, calculating, and too fond
of young men/ THESE THREE:/ caught up in the web of rage and
contempt spun by the twisted mind of Richard Baurie, the youth who
deceived them all and then, step by terrifying step, directed their lives
down the path to explosive violence.

What more do we need? One more step and we can get through a book
without reading it. The paper edition ( 1952 ) of J. P. Marquand's Point
of No Return (1949; 1952) admirably performs this final chore in a
paragraph of illuminated writing, with pictures punctuating the prose.

148 The Denatured Novel

Here is Charles Gray, ( ) still dreaming his dreams of his lost, lovely
Jessica, ( ) living out his life in quiet desperation, with his nice wife,
( ) and their two kids, { ) ( ) in their Connecticut home. ( )
The boundaries of Charley's life are home, the country club ( ) where
he plays golf, the bank ( ) where he works.

Another paragraph states but without informing what the hero's
universal problem really is:

Here is the poignant story of a man imprisoned in the grip of circum-
stances beyond his control a man caught in the net of his own daily
life. POINT OF NO RETURN is a beautiful, powerful and universal
novel, by one of America's greatest writers ( ) JOHN P. MAR-
QUAND.

This nonsense is the result of economic cause. The present revival
of inexpensive paperbacks owes its existence to a particular method of
distribution, and the books themselves have been tailored to accom-
modate it. This method of bookselling has caused remarkable changes
in the form of the novel itself but more obviously in the representation
of the whole idea of literature. The latter consequence deserves a close
look, for the reprinter has become a taste-maker.

Put yourself in his shoes. In order to tell the reader what to look for
and to condition him for more of the same, you must ignore or mis-
represent the relative worth of the individual book. This is true even
if you are publishing the works of a single novelist, particularly if he
happens to be a best seller. Once committed to an author, once started
on this market-building program, the publisher cannot countenance
the difference between artistic success and failure, even though this dif-
ference may be vast. He must press all these works into the same shape
and appearance.

The collected reprints of Erskine Caldwell decisively illustrate this.
More copies of his books have been sold than of any other novelist.
Caldwell is one of the monoliths of the reprint business; even by its
own standards his gross sales are extraordinary. Since 1946 his twenty-

Instant Fiction 149

five paperbound novels and short-story volumes have so far sold thirty-
five million copies. In addition to the seven million copies of Gocf s
Little Acre four of his other novels have each sold between three mil-
lion and five million copies; the sales of two others are approaching
three million; and five more of his titles have sold over a million.

Caldwell can explain this sales record in his own obtuse way. "My
grandfather, who had the reputation for telling the biggest whoppers
ever heard in Sycamore County, Georgia, used to tell me that his stories
were actually no better than hundreds told by others, but that he had
learned how to raise interest to the point where people would begin
nudging one another in anticipation when they saw him coming down
the street." The advertising copy on his own books has the same effect.

The blurbs in his reprinted novels and short stories make interesting
reading. They repeatedly claim for their various contents nothing less
than the entire aesthetic range at the same time. One novel achieves
"a matchless gift for portraying comedy and tragedy"; another, "the
matchless blend of comedy and tragedy"; still another is "funny,
earthy, tragic." His first book, Tobacco Road, offers "humor, tragedy,
horror and pathos," and Episode in Palmetto (igSo; 1953 ), published
twenty-five years later, is a "moving mixture of the comedy and tragedy
of everyday life." Ths Sure Hand of God (1947; 1949) is a "riotous,
bawdy, and sometimes tragic story"; and the episodes in Gulf Coast
Stories (1957) " ran g e from bawdy comedy to quiet tragedy."

The impression is inescapable that this author offers all things to all
readers, In fact, this is just what the preview in God's Little Acre as-
serts. "What accounts for the extraordinary appeal of this book?" the
copy writer candidly wonders. "The answer, the critics say, lies in its
humanity which offers every reader the kind of reading experience he
prefers." Everybody wins a prize. "If it's laughter you like, it's here in
abundance; if it's social significance, you'll find that too; if you seek
insight into the lives of people who may seem very different to you, it's
here. And if you're looking for good writing, Erskine Caldwell is one
of the best literary craftsmen of our veneration."

If you sense the splendid equivocation in this marketese you are on
the right track. In fact, the copy writers, are not alone in their puzzle-
ment over Caldwell's fiction. Its tone is undeniably ambiguous. The

1 50 The Denatured Novel

author disdains public comment about it, by himself or by anyone
else; and there is no substantial appraisal of it. No one has yet contra-
dicted these claims.

There is reason for this reticence. Caldwell's autobiography, Call It
Experience (1951; 1956), says nothing significant about his writing,
although his comments in another volume do get to the point. For the
trade edition of a collection of short stories, called Jackpot (1940), his
publisher prevailed upon him to write a series of prefaces, and Cald-
well wrote seventy-five statements ranging from a sentence to a para-
graph including that one about his grandfather which parody the
art of prefacing. In its entirety one of these prefaces reads: "If Profes-
sor Perkins would relax, he might at least get a little fun out of some
of these stories." And later: "If Professor Horatio Perkins is still leafing
through these pages, I hope he will not become discouraged and give
up. Even if he does not succeed in discovering the secret of writing
fiction, at least he will find comfort in the knowledge that the author
himself is up a similar tree."

In one of these prefaces Caldwell explains how he parries polite ques-
tions about his work. Once a year he jots down ten or fifteen titles, and
every three or four weeks he writes a story for one of them. It saves the
trouble of looking around for titles afterward. As this straight-faced lie
might indicate, Caldwell likes shaggy-dog stories. His fiction is just as
shaggy.

This sort of remark, like his fiction, puts the critic off. Despite gen-
erous reviewing, Caldwell's fiction has received only scant critical atten-
tion, for two good reasons. His fiction has made a great deal of money,
which tends to embarrass academic criticism; and it is often funny
terribly funny but without any obvious significance. His stories are
not satires; they encourage no social program; and such undirected
humor embarrasses academic spokesmen. Caldwell has even affected
dismay over the interpretation of his writing as humorous, thereby
adding another hair to the shaggy dog.

Erskine Caldwell writes fantasies about improbable people. He
writes about grotesques who understand one another but who are out
of touch with the rest of the world, like the crackers and the hillbillies
he grew up knowing. They are incongruous characters: they take irrele-

Instant Fiction 151

vant matters seriously, and they take the momentous for granted. They
somewhat resemble the characters in medieval fabliaux, such as those
Chaucer's Reeve and Miller and Summoner tell about, or the rogues
in Fielding's or Smollett's novels. But Caldwell's fiction has more of an
animus, like the tall tale which insults the listener, such as Mark
Twain learned from his newspaper colleagues.

Caldwell caricatures these peculiar people. Except for a few bold
details the reader must complete them for himself and make his own
assessment. The author merely tells anecdotes about them. He dis-
closes, without developing, a situation. He writes in Journeyman (1935;
1947), of the man who bets his father-in-law's watch in a crap game,
covers it with his automobile, then his wife and loses them all. He
writes of a father, in Tragic Ground ( 1944; 1948 ) , who calls at a brothel
to take his daughter home, forgets his errand, and stays the night. He
tells of the fun-loving widow, in The Sure Hand of God (1947; 1949 ),
who entertains her gentlemen callers with a hypo of what she believes
to be vitamins. The implications of these anecdotes, however, become
the reader's responsibility.

These are typical anecdotes, bizarre and toneless. The quality of
every one of his novels depends on the extent to which such anecdotes
become analogies, or to which they develop the implications of one
another. In one of his prefaces to Jackpot Caldwell writes, "I have a
great respect for my grandfather's method of criticism. To him a story
was either a humdinger or God-awful." And these are precisely the
alternatives of Caldwell's own novels.

The least of his novels are merely literal repetitions of anecdotes. In
the best of them, however, the anecdotes variously enforce one another
and evolve a meaning beyond any one of them. By literal repetition
Caldwell's improbable people become impossible, inert characters.
But when the episodes vary, they suggest a whole world in which these
improbable people come alive. This distinction marks Caldwell's nov-
els far more fundamentally than the superficialities of subject matter
on which the copy writers continually harp.

Trouble in July (1940; 1945) is Caldwell's finest novel; This Very
Earth (1948; 1951) is one of his worst. Their subjects are utterly dif-
ferent. But you would never guess these differences from the paperback

152 The Denatured Novel

blurbs. The news-story preview of each novel promises the display of
some sociological problem: one of race hatred and the other of juvenile
delinquency. The prose of both blurbs is charged with hormones. One
teaser features the dishonesty of "an over-sexed, promiscuous girl,"
and the other features a girl's vexing hunger for a man, "to keep from
being lonely.' 7 The advertising marvelously disguises the facts.

Trouble in July tells of a man-hunt which ends in two murders. One
is the lynching of an innocent Negro accused of raping a white girl.
The other is the execution of this girl who has wrongfully accused the
Negro. The lynchers stone her to death. The horror of this story is its
believability. These obsessed characters do come alive, as the novel re-
veals a state of mind that prevails in their world. Their awesome stu-
pidity is incongruous with any outside sense of values; but the wild,
fanciful anecdotes which comprise the novel have so diversified brutish
irresponsibility that these characters seem capable of anything.

The anecdotes complement one another. The irrelevant indulgences
of the characters can be ludicrous and laughable or terrible, depending
on the circumstances. The fat sheriff "wants to keep the lynching po-
litically clean" to avoid publicly declaring himself for this Negro
against the white men whose votes he will need. But he also wants to
keep up appearances, so he locks himself in jail on the fatal evening to
make it seem as though the lynchers had forced him out of action. It
develops, however, that in the dark he has locked himself in the wrong
cell, with a mulatto woman in whose company his wife and the lynch-
ing party later discover him.

Another episode concerns the argument between the village barber
and Shep Barlowe, the girl's father, over how to conduct the lynching.
They start to fight with knives, and when an old man tries to restore
the peace they knock him down and presumably kill him. The old
man's fate is not clear, however, since no further mention is made of
him. Still another episode recalls how Shep Barlowe behaved when his
wife died. She disappeared one day, upsetting his whole routine, and
his temper lasted a week before he set out to find her. When he finally
did discover her corpse at the bottom of the well, he threw all his cord-
wood down after her.

No editorializing accompanies these anecdotes, but they comple-
ment one another. They develop the conviction of a kind of mass mind

Instant Fiction 153

that can hang or stone or bury in cordwood anyone who opposes it.
Even so, the Negro might have escaped had he not stopped to feed his
rabbits; and the girl wishes she could bring herself to tell the men
about her mistake. Thus, the novel cumulates the sense of monstrous
incongruity peculiar to a lynching.

The sadism in This Very Earth is no more costly, no more horrible.
It is just not believable. The reason is that this novel's anecdotes liter-
ally and categorically repeat one another, and nothing relieves the con-
stant extremity. In this book a man named Chism Crockett has re-
signed his life to the indulgence of his own passion, which includes the
exploitation and the torture of his children. He gets his eleven-year-old
son drunk and makes the boy watch him fornicate. He blackmails one
of his daughters and tries to exploit a love affair of the other. The man
has no more motive than the white girl has in Trouble in July. But this
novel lacks the various disclosure that might imply a cause.

Chism Crockett merely and literally repeats himself throughout This
Very Earth, and so do the other characters. Chism's son-in-law is seen
almost exclusively in the act of beating his wife (the only development
being that he finally beats her to death). Chism's son and Chism's
father are also caricatures; they also exist without living. One repeated-
ly tries to reason with Chism and the other repeatedly harangues him.
All the characters affect concern over whether Chism should stay in
the city or move back to the country so that his children can have a
wholesome life as though this had anything to do with his behavior.
These characters exist only by the author's assertion, and each one
compounds the felony by imitating himself. There is no cause or con-
sequence in their actions, and no reason in the novel.

By insisting on the sensations of one of Chism's daughters the
"Bad Girl" who is "too free and easy ... to keep out of trouble" the
preview in the paperback edition of This Very Earth suggests a ra-
tionale the novel does not have. This is true of the presentation of most
of Caldwell's novels. The advertising insists on the vitality of sex or sin,
but the novels disclose no such vitality. The fiction contains characters
who literally repeat their own excesses, and this goes unassessed by any
other behavior. The fault is not in the sexuality but in the unbelievable
self-sameness.

Once, long ago, Caldwell did build a convincing novel about this

1 54 The Denatured Novel

goatish concupiscence, In God'; Little Acre the members of Ty Ty
Walden's family live and die by lust. The beautiful Griselda inspires
Ty Ty's embarrassingly funny rhetoric, her brother-in-law's animalism,
an absurdly futile pursuit by another in-law, and a murder by her
jealous husband. These irregularities cause Ty Ty continually to la-
ment God's unfortunate error in creating animal and human in the
same being, and Ty Ty's laments reveal the shrewd stupidity by which
these people justify themselves.

Ty Ty's denial of his tithe, by moving God's Little Acre expediently
out of the way of each prospective gold mine on his property, drama-
tizes the fallibility of these characters. He has so often violated the
Third Commandment that when the murder happens to occur on
God's Little Acre, lately removed from the site of the newest dig, the
coincidence becomes a retribution. By their various distortions these
ludicrous anecdotes develop an idea about the rationalization of hate
and desire which can put an end to everything.

But this was many years and many novels ago, and as each new re-
print reminds the purchaser that it is written "by the author of God's
Little Acre," the irony in the gross implication becomes more painfully
obvious. The case of Erskine Caldwell is typical. Every reprinter prom-
ises more of the same, no matter who the author or what the book
happens to be.

There is an old joke in the book trade about the person who asks,
"Why should I buy a book? I already have one/ 7 But this turns out to
be a pretty expensive joke. The reprinters' distortion of their products
has encouraged just this sort of inertia. With the narrow margin of
profit, every reprinter understands the vast effect of a small change. A
half cent a copy, even for one printing, can mean the difference of
thousands of dollars. The reprinter is used to this kind of arithmetic
and to the need for precision, but he overlooks the comparable effect
of small changes in the literary quality of his product. This is a curious
oversight, since he himself makes such pretension of displaying a
book's literary credentials.

It is irrelevant to ask why the reprinter does not publish better books.
He publishes the best he can find, commensurate with the risks of a
large-volume business. In this particular matter of conscience he can

Instant Fiction 155

probably sleep better at night than the trade publisher. But by market-
ing his wares all as the same product he distorts the books he does pub-
lish. Every novel is the extension of its author it is individual. The
value of a novel lies in this significant difference, within the experience
everyone shares. But the reprinter denies this.

The parrot-like salesmanship of the reprint business contradicts it-
self. It denies the possibilities of the distribution system. Since the
basis of the business is the rapid turnover of many titles with very
little display room in which to sell the reprinter must attract atten-
tion to each book. To this purpose the individuality of a book is natu-
rally congenial. It is even strategic in finding new readers. But by ignor-
ing or disguising this individuality the reprinter encourages the reader
to limit every book that he does buy to what the reprinter says it is.

Meanwhile the image grows of a literature so parochial that all its
books render the same experience, that all are equally "poignant" and
"powerful/' "brutal" and "compassionate," and that one can do the
job as well as another.

Chapter VII

After Marquand, the Deluge

IF A NOVEL convinces readers of what they want to believe anyway,
chances are it will succeed commercially. If it informs or instructs the
reader at the same time then it can be readily excused for being fiction
and for being successful. This takes some doing.

The image of such fiction of an entire literature of such fiction, in
fact is what the inexpensive paperbacks attempt to sell. But paper-
back advertising merely extends to more books the implication of quali-
ties magazine fiction and movie fiction actually possess. The magazines
and the movies have stylized the novel form to make it serve acceptable
attitudes without seeming to.

The fiction in both these media stresses a sharp, definable conflict
which will surprisingly resolve in a favorable manner. To help disguise
this fortuity, to make it seem convincing, this fiction offers a superficial
authenticity of costumes, setting, speech and manners. More impor-
tant, such fiction contains no analogies which would test or evaluate
the conflict. A single encounter exists by itself, solved or "proven" in its
own terms, with all the absolute value of a cat's-cradle.

These are permanent qualities of the stylized fiction of the maga-
zines and the movies. Making the illusion convincing is a matter of
making the conflict localize some large, public, and usually urgent
difference of opinion; and there are as many ways of doing this as there
are writers. But there is usually a similarity in ways and means from
one fiction to another.

This is a sore point with all writers. Although there is always a con-

156

After Marquand, the Deluge 1 57

tinuity of ideas and techniques in any art form (no writer can achieve
what he does without others who have gone before him), any author
resents it when his work is made into some facile equation with the
work of others. In his preface to The Butterfly James M. Cain spoke for
the majority of writers when he said, "Schools don't help the novelist,
but they do help the critic; using as the mucilage the simplifications
that the school hypothesis affords him, he can paste labels wherever

convenience is served by pasting labels " Cain straightened out the

critics, "these strange surrogates for God," in this elemental matter.
"You're really being a little naive, you know. We don't do it that way.
We don't say to ourselves that some lucky fellow did it a certain way,
so we'll do it that way too, and cut in on the sugar. We have to do it
our way, each for himself, or there isn't any sugar."

The novelist writes as he is, no doubt. But that is only half the
story. His work is published under auspices which deny this spirited
principle of individuality. "Imitation by publishers has become an in-
creasingly frequent cause of intensified competition," O. H. Cheney's
Survey informed the trade in 1931. In a chapter entitled "The Book,
The Buyer, and The Critic," Cheney wrote of this compulsive publish-
ing which causes disastrous overstocks: "two or three simultaneous
books on some English poet or French beauty, seven simultaneous
biographies of a football coach, hordes of books on Russia. Even if
everyone of the books were good, what good would it be?"

This is not just a problem of quantity. By a calculated imitation the
book trade sells books by disguising whatever individuality they have.
Publishers think of books in categories and exploit any association they
can. A book's entire presentation is usually aimed at cashing-in on
some previous success. This is almost a matter of superstition among
publishers. It even extends to the titling of books.

When Alfred Knopf published Kurt W. Marek's exciting study of
archeology (under the pseudonym of C. W. Ceram) and entitled it
Gods, Graves, and Scholars (iqSi ), it sold startlingly well. When they
were sure of its success other publishers moved in. Knopf had appar-
ently uncovered more of a cache than his archeologist had. The Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press happened to release a study by Joseph L. Smith,
entitled Tombs, Temples 6 Ancient Art (1956). But the three-decker

1 58 The Denatured Novel

alliterative title had already been rediscovered in Leo Gurko's Heroes,
Highbrows and the Popular Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953) and Paul
Wellman's GZpry, God, and Gold (Doubleday, 1954).

"God" was a frequent partner in this multitude of success stories.
Henry Armstrong's autobiography, Gloves, Glory, and God (F. H.
Revell, 1956) was followed by Howard E. Kershner's God, Go/d, and
Government (Prentice-Hall, 1957); by George Ashbaugh's story of
the Mormons, Gods, Sex, and Saints (Augustana, 1957), and by
W. H. D. Rouse's Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece (New
American Library, 1957). Prentice-Hall was still at it with the title of
William E. Hulme's book, God, Sex & Youth ( 1959) .

If a three decker title cannot accommodate "God," then the next
best thing is alliteration. Rogues, Royalty, and Reporters (Hough ton
Mifflin, 1956), by William B. Ewald, appeared in the same year as
Zoomies, Subs, and Zeros (Greenberg), by Charles A. Lockwood and
Hans C. Adamson, and Magic, Myth, and Medicine (World), by
Donald T. Atkinson. An anthology of crime, Murder, Mayhem and
Mystery (Barnes, 1958), edited by Alan Hynd, followed them to mar-
ket, along with Blondes, Brunettes, and Bullets (McKay, 1957), ^y
Nils T. Granlund.

Even if publishers could not work in "God" or alliteration, there was
still the magic trinity of Gods, Graves, and Scholars. Louis Paul's
Heroes, Kings, and Men (Dial, 1955) an( ^ Grillot De Givry's Witch-
craft, Magic and Alchemy (Books, 1958), attest to this. And if one
trinity is not enough there is always the sub-title, as demonstrated by
William Irvine's Apes, Angels, and Victorians; The Story of Darwin,
Huxley, and Evolution (McGraw-Hill, 1955). Real originality fright-
ens most publishers, to the detriment of theirbooks. There is more
than just the reassuring likeness of these titles. Most of the books
ended up being hawked for a few cents in the mail catalogues of the
"remainder" houses.

This is the way publishers herd their products. When a book does
find a market it will surely be followed by others like it or as nearly
like it as their publishers can make them seem. This explains the do-
mestic novels which clustered after Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide
World (1850), the novels of ethical religion which flocked after Rob-

After Marquand, the Deluge 1 59

ert Elsmere (1888), or the vogue in fat historical novels which An-
thony Adverse (1933) and Gone -with the Wind (1936) revived. But
these are merely some obvious cases of what goes on all the time.

Whether an author belongs to any "school" does not much matter
his publisher will enroll him in one. A successful book has always
created a market for more like it, and there are always writers willing
to gratify the demand. The evidence of these clustered books is always
the same; their mannerism deteriorates the original appeal. They cari-
cature those qualities in the original which were presumed to make it
sell in the first place. Sometimes the mannered imitations even carica-
ture one another.

There are different ways to describe this syndrome. Alfred Knopf has
described it in terms of the difficulty of publishing the works of new
authors. "One of the reasons ... is that they have to compete dollar
for dollar in retail price with works of a similar kind and length by the
best-established authors." (Knopf printed this in The Borzoi Quar-
terly, Second Quarter, 1957. ) As he put it, it is a case of the reader buy-
ing a sure thing or buying a risk. "In other words you can buy five or
six hundred pages of a new novel by John P. Marquand and know just
exactly what you are going to get, or pay the same price for a book of
the same length by someone you never read and have never heard of,
which book may utterly disappoint you after fifty pages." One expedi-
ent remedy, of course, is to minimize the risk, to make the new novel
sound like one of John Marquand's. This would be mannerism.

Wherever yon find fiction directed toward a timely subject you will
find mannered novels. A good bet for a timely subject is business and
the businessman; and most business novels display obsequious man-
nerism. For the past ten or twelve years the magazines have given
business novels devoted attention. Every few months pedants gather,
sort, and classify attitudes in novels to discover whether or not the
author really approves of his hero. The polls have nothing really to say
about fiction, since fictional attitudes cannot be classified as though
they were actual. Only rarely can readers agree on thematic niceties in
any competent and reasonably complex novel. Aside from what they
attempt to prove, however, the polls do reflect a lively interest in the
business novel.

1 60 The Denatured Novel

It is not a new but a continuing interest. American business novels
began to appear after the Civil War, when it looked as though indus-
trial capitalism would destroy the ideology of an inherited democratic
and agrarian way of life. Machines, technological unemployment, and
the pressures that heavy capital could exert apparently threatened to
annihilate free enterprise. Some novels dramatized the moral problems
of making money; some exposed business malpractices; a few worried
over the threat of a powerful proletariat; most of them localized the
love-and-duty conflict in a business setting and steered clear of ideas.
But right from the start American business novels capitalized on the
public sense of urgency about their subject.

By 1900 novelists could count on the widespread distrust of business,
particularly of Big Business. The many-sided transactions of financial
capitalism had presented new opportunities for fees, confused the
notion of profits, and increased the suspicion that the middleman was
growing disproportionately rich. The Congressional investigation of
the money trust, in 1912 and 1913, consequent to J. P. Morgan's or-
ganization of the General Electric, United States Steel and Interna-
tional Harvester companies, reflected the popular suspicion of Big
Business. Almost continuously investigated by state legislatures, after
its organization in 1870, the Standard Oil Corporation was already a
national scapegoat by 1902, when Ida M. Tarbell's exposes of it began
to appear in McClure's Magazine.

Muckraking journalism increased the market for economic fiction.
Novelists could represent business transactions with the assurance of
both knowledgeable and partisan readers. Fiction and journalism were
often scarcely distinguishable. Upton Sinclair insisted that The Jungle
(1906), his novel about the meat-packing industry, had the validity of
a sociological study. The economic novels of Robert Herrick, Frank
Norris and Theodore Dreiser were just as stoutly documented.

Publishers worked the appeal both ways. Charles Edward Russell, a
New York reporter, published a factual report on the meat-packing
industry, The Greatest Trust in the World (1905). It was a series of
magazine articles documented by maps, tables and graphs, and repro-
ductions of forged trade bills. But aware of readers' wishes, the pub-

After Marquand, the Deluge 161

lisher advertised the book as a "tragic romance of modern business
life."

The methods of newspaper reporting and a strong editorial legacy
account for the distinctive qualities of American business novels. Their
subject is always timely, and their tone is urgent. In both respects they
have kept pace with the vast transformations in the business world
since the end of the nineteenth century. New industries with new
products for new markets have helped revolutionize financing, distribu-
tion and selling, as well as manufacture. Through all these changes the
economic novel has kept tabs on the businessman's response to busi-
ness.

Business novels still worry over the fact that business swallows up
the individual, but they have updated the subject. In the timely ver-
sions of this plight the individual's impotence is inevitable. Being
swallowed up, in fact, is the only way to succeed in business. Keeping
up with the times, therefore, contemporary business novels are de-
voted to the pathology of success.

Mannerism begins to show up in the novels over the attitudes they
urge toward this presumed inevitability of success. Popular fiction al-
ways turns out to have gratified people's wishes in an apparently con-
vincing way. Popular fiction in America has always been in the peculiar
position of having to justify success. The business novel is a persistent,
local instance of this.

Success can be indiscriminately applauded, which is easy to do; it
can be rationalized as inevitable and therefore right, which is a little
more involved; or it can be explained, which is still more complex.
Among contemporary business novels, the first which gained any popu-
larity by trying to explain this inevitability was John Marquand's Point
of No Return (1949). The present pathology of success in business
novels really began with this book, which made a great many, and
many different, audiences aware of a situation; and it made a singular
impression on the book trade. In the flood of business novels which
deluged the market after Point of No Return even the waves had
waves.

After appearing in abridged form in the Atlantic and then as a five-

1 62 The Denatured Novel

part serial in Ladies Home Journal the novel was published in 1949.
During the summer of that year the Book-of-the-Month Club offered it
as a dividend. Grosset & Dunlap then published two editions of Point
of No Return; and by the time Bantam's first paperbound edition ap-
peared in 1952 well over a half-million copies had already been sold
through trade, book-club, and reprint distribution. Later in 1952 the
book was adapted to the stage and began a year's run on Broadway.

The success of Marquand's business novel gave point to Alfred
Knopfs remark (which he originally made in 1951) about buying a
sure thing when you buy Marquand's books. Although not sensational,
the book's sales were high, and they reflected the steady buying of dis-
tinctly different markets. The fact that eight different publishers have
since anthologized parts of the novel indicates its appeal to a variety
of tastes and judgments. Also, it had created this appeal at a time of a
rising market for novels in paperbound editions. Mannerism was one
obvious result. Clusters of business novels thematically similar to
Point of No Return began to appear in the early fifties.

Point of No Return provided a point of departure for most of its
successors, It dramatized a situation many novels have subsequently
caricatured by exaggerating and simplifying it, But Marquand took a
satirical not a popular view of his subject, and the mannerists,
avoiding this view, have ended up with attitudes which do not fit the
situation.

Marquand's novel dramatizes Charles Gray's career in the Stuyve-
sant Bank to that climactic point when he learns whether he or Roger
Blakesley is to become the bank's newest vice-president. The job will
ultimately lead to the presidency, and each man has committed him-
self and his family to a war of attrition for a prize which only one of
them can have. It would seem so simple: Gray has an adversary com-
peting with him for the favor of the bank's president, Tony Burton,
yet this exhaustive personal conflict turns out to be irrelevant.

Gray realizes he cannot reduce the bank to any manageable or satis-
fying terms. "The Stuyvesant was the aggregate of the character of
many individuals, who merged a part of their personal strivings and
ambitions into a common effort." Gray conjures up metaphors to ex-
plain the bank to himself. "It was like a head of living coral rising

After Marquand, the Deluge 163

above the surf, a small outcropping of a greater reef/' And all of its
individuals, from the doorman to the directors, "were . . . asses follow-
ing their bundles of hay." "They were all on an assembly line, but you
could not blame the line. It was too cumbersome, too inhumanely
human for anyone to blame."

A few pages before the end of the novel, Gray is still trying to ap-
praise it all. He and his wife have been invited to dine at Burton's
home, obviously to be told the fate of his career. After a few more
hours of attrition for the Grays, in social small talk with the boss and
his wife, the gentlemen retire to the library, and Gray concentrates on
the imminent disaster. In that short walk across the hall, "he was actu-
ally walking . . . over the road of his career, a feeble little human track
like the progress of a sea creature in the sand/'

Having seen his own tiny image, Gray begins to adjust to it. His
career is as good as over, and he must retreat to a new position. He and
his wife will sell their suburban house and move into a smaller place;
they will give up their plans for the more exclusive country club and
for private schools. He begins to realize how tired he has been. He will
never have to try so hard again, or be so cautious or obsequious. Then
a deep sense of relief overcomes him. " 'It's over/ he said to himself as
he walked across the hall. 'Thank God, it's over/ It was the first time
he had felt really free." But the shocking news of success explodes this
peace.

Gray suddenly learns that he has won the job, in a manner that stuns
him. Burton casually announces the fact, then shows surprise that there
should even be any doubt. There has been no conflict between Gray
and Blakesley as far as the Bank is concerned. "You never thought any
of us were considering Blakesley seriously, did you?" Blakesley was just
not the right material; and as for the vice-presidency, says Burton, "it
never occurred to me that you'd have any doubts about it."

It paralyzes Gray to learn that he has never had any control of the
situation, that he has no more power to refuse the honor than he had
in winning it. He feels dull and very tired. He foresees a new profes-
sional friendship with his employer, and transactions for a larger house,
a new car, a more exclusive country club. Even before the end of the
conversation he realizes he has never left the treadmill.

164 The Denatured Novel

Gray has made no decision. His success, already decided for him, is
analogous to his entire life. He cannot even discover where the point
of no return occurred, There has been no point at all, but a line stretch-
ing back into his past, across which he could never step.

Growing up in a small New England village, Charles Gray has al-
ways known the primitive rituals of the caste system. But "system"
means more in this book than merely social stratification. To Gray's
father, for instance, it has meant the arrangement of one's whole eco-
nomic existence. "The system is not fluid and it is very hard to beat,"
he says. "What system?" Charles asks. "Why, the system under which
we live. . . . The order. There's always some sort of order."

The hero's father has cultivated an independence in social matters
which has made him an eccentric to the rest of the community, as if
he were trying to beat the system by scorning it; then, following the
loss of an inherited fortune on the stock market, he proves his point
by suicide. The son absorbs the lesson; as he later explains to his wife:
"There's no use getting mad at the system. We're part of a system
where there's always someone waiting to kick you in the teeth in a
nice way." Gray solves the system by acceding to it, and the plot of the
novel bears him out.

Charles Gray's debilitating success dramatizes the peculiar course of
literary naturalism in America. You can see how small the businessman
has shrunk when you measure Gray by another hero, Silas Lapham,
about whom William Dean Howells wrote, sixty-four years earlier. The
comparison is useful. The Rise of Silas Lapham ( 1885 ) presents a hero
with a moral problem, involving financial success or failure, which he
resolves by himself. Howells idealizes the individual's control of affairs,
and thereby hangs another tale.

Silas Lapham manufactures a paint whose excellence has made him
wealthy, and he determines to use this wealth to improve his family's
social position. But Lapham has made a costly compromise with his
conscience, having forced out of partnership the man whose money he
once needed. When this partner returns and asks for help, LaphanVs
wife prevails on her husband to pay off his conscience. The ex-partner
is dishonest, but Lapham pointedly ignores the bad risk and loans him
large amounts just before his paint business begins to fail.

After Marquand, the Deluge 165

The hero must capitalize his business or go bankrupt, but he has
loaned his capital and spent his credit. At this point the ex-partner
reappears, having found some purchasers for the land Lapham holds as
collateral on the loans, and which both men know to be worthless. The
hero's dilemma is clear: to sell the land and recover his loss, or to refuse
to sell and save the other party, and the author subjects him to all the
tortures of righteousness.

Lapham spends the night pacing his room, and Howells likens his
struggle to Jacob wrestling with the angel. Like Jacob, following the
struggle, Lapham finds peace. He has victoriously decided to go bank-
rupt. Virtue triumphs. He loses the battle to win the great moral war.

The picture of this Victorian businessman wrestling with the angel
apparently gratified the women who read the novel and dreamed of
what a virtuous world it would be if their husbands would only listen
to them. The fun of justifying success consisted in deciding the terms
on which one would accept it. But what made the dream convincing
was the assumption, which Howells shared with his readers, that man
was a free agent in the first place.

Marquand and his readers share no such luxury. Within the literary
history which contains both novels the fact of "scientific" determinism
separates them. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this doc-
trine became incorporated in a theory of composition known as literary
naturalism, which aimed to document determinism in copious and
authentic detail. With the illusion of complete objectivity, according
to this theory, the novelist would prove that the individual man is a
small and limited creature, determined by heredity or by the social or
economic forces of his environment.

No one has yet written the novel which could perfectly conform to
Emile Zola's definition of this theory not even Zola. Because natural-
ism denies any special significance to human beings, it therefore denies
the vitality of fiction. Nevertheless, the prestige of literary naturalism
in Germany and France, the translation of Zola's literary criticism into
English, and American fiction's affair with journalism have so influ-
enced writers that virtually every economic novel in America after 1900
at least implies some reference to naturalism.

This theory reflects the change in the businessman from an active

1 66 The Denatured Novel

hero to a passive one, from a Silas Lapham to a Charles Gray, Business
history records substantial cause for the extinction of a Silas Lapham
from the business world. Lapham was an entrepreneur, owner and
manager. During the twentieth century, however, business organiza-
tion outgrew his kind. With the development of the great public cor-
porations, even before World War I, ownership and control began to
separate and to offer disparate images to the public mind.

During the thirties the concept of ownership changed as Big Busi-
ness strenuously publicized the notion of a people's capitalism, de-
pendent on many small stockholders. As for control, people gradually
heard about a new kind of businessman, called the administrator. Here
was a new image of the businessman. The image was anticipated by
Adolphe A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means in their epochal study, The
Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932). They discovered
that some two hundred non-banking corporations dominated the na-
tional economy and that the control of these corporations lay not in
their legal owners, the stockholders, but in their executive managers.

Manuals of business management sold briskly as early as the igzo's.
By the time of World War II, James Burnham's The Managerial Rev-
olution (1941) dramatized the new apotheosis of business adminis-
trators. The nation, said Burnham, must now acknowledge business
managers as a new social group. This new professional manager actu-
ally controlled the instruments of production. But even the manager
was only an employee. He had no function by himself. He was only a
unit of the great business society.

No wonder Charles Gray sees himself as a small sea animal and the
Stuyvesant Bank as the outcropping of a reef. Point of No Return
uniquely represents its times, as Howells' novel once did. But in Mar-
quand's view Charles Gray's promotion to the Bank's vice-presidency
is distressing. This is where Marquand's successors part company with
him. But they don't part very straight.

These mannerists exaggerate the plight of the businessman over-
come by success, but they avoid any honest dilemma over it. Instead,
they celebrate it. Their main problem, therefore, is to make it look as
though there were a problem in the first place between the business-
man and this benevolent business system. The best way to see this

After Marquand, the Deluge i by

mannerism at work is to compare some of the caricatures of the passive
businessman which followed Point of No Return to market.

Between 1952 and 1956, the five years during which the first paper-
bound edition of Marquand's novel remained in print, the most com-
mercially successful business novels were Cameron Hawley's Executive
Suite (1952) and CashMcCall (1954), Howard Swiggett's The Power
and the Prize (1954), and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flan-
nel Suit (1955). All of these books appeared in paperbound editions,
two of them had additional book-club sales, and all of them were
adapted to motion pictures. Each earned more for its author than John
Marquand's novel had earned.

These books variously emphasize the most recognizable qualities of
Point of No Return. A fifth novel, published during this period, is
George DeMare's The Empire and Martin Brill (1956). This novel
amplifies the qualities of Point of No Return as well as those in its
four other predecessors. But all of these latter novels are eclectic; they
are all stylized.

The narratives differ. In all of them, however, a particular business
enterprise becomes both the emblem and index of "the system." And
most of them have inflated the net assets and size of the business and
its control over the individual. The change from "company" to "cor-
poration" and then to "empire" suggests their magnification of the
system. Even Howard Swiggett's The Power and the Prize, the most
apparently humanistic of them all, insinuates a benevolent determin-
ism by a board of directors.

Swiggett's novel tells about Cleves Barwick, the executive officer of
Allied Metals Corporation, -and his endeavor to form an international
company that will revolutionize the world production of nonferrous
metals. But Barwick falls in love with a woman of whom the chairman
of the board cannot approve. A refugee from Central Europe and a
suspected Communist sympathizer, she would presumably become a
liability to the Corporation. The chairman discredits Barwick's choice
in such a way as to jeopardize the negotiations for the new company.
Clearly, Barwick must choose between the woman and the company.

His defense of his fiancee rests solely on her denial of having been a
Communist, and apparently he can reconcile the conflict only by lying.

1 68 The Denatured Novel

The Corporation's directors give him a chance to declare that he has
already investigated her political past, thereby clearing the Corpora-
tion of any guilt which may befall her. Barwick refuses to lie, but an
old movie "gimmick" saves him. The directors were merely testing his
integrity. They know he has not investigated his fiancee, so instead of
firing him for his testimony they promote him to the chairmanship of
the board. With this endorsement he completes negotiations for the
new company before embarking on his honeymoon.

Here is the old-fashioned conflict between love and duty, but Swig-
gett has updated it. The hero with a choice to make is not really a free
agent. Although Barwick has maintained his right not to explain any-
thing, the circumstances has been rigged. He is on trial before a jury
which already possesses the facts and which conducts the prosecution.
At the moment of his triumph Barwick is less the protagonist than he
appeared. As with Charles Gray the system has acted benevolently, but
in this novel nobody worries about it.

One might miss this subtle downgrading of the hero in an exalted
system had not Howard Swiggett literally repeated himself in his next
and final novel, The Durable Fire (1957). In this latter version of the
same story the hero argues with his uninformed and hypocritical boss,
and the case goes before the directors of the Corporation. It turns out,
however, that these representatives of the benevolent system already
know the facts and merely wish the hero to justify their decision in his
behalf.

Business enterprise even more thoroughly pre-empts the individual
in Cameron Hawley's Cash McCall; and by another round of inflation
the presiding force of this business world appears even further removed
from the company employees. This Olympian force is itself a business:
the purchase and sale of corporations, sustained by the federal tax
law's provision for capital gains. In this new world the oldtime religion
of company loyalty loses favor, and the novel's apparent conflict pro-
ceeds from this fact.

Ownership has become a commodity. Brokers manipulate compa-
nies, often fraudulently for profit, denying the permanent value of a
business and its service to the community. So it seems to Gil Clark, a
young man dedicated to managing the Suffolk Moulding Company,

After Marquand, the Deluge 1 69

which will apparently be sacrificed to this sort of manipulation. Gil
finally meets his adversary, Cash McCall, the symbol of this system,
the manipulator whose name has become legend.

But this Croesus confounds all expectations. He operates legally. "I
don't make the rules, Gil. I only play the game. I never thought much
of making the kick-for-point after touchdown, either, but as long as
it's in the rule book, that's the way the game is played." What could
be more American? Or more unassailably moral? "There's only one way
I can get a wallop out of a deal like this, Gil. And that's by way of
knowing that I haven't dug money out of another man's hide."

McCall is downright benign, as any magazine reader could tell in an
instant: he is in his "late thirties, possibly forty . . . more like a pro-
fessional athlete than a businessman." He also has impeccable man-
ners, and although he owns unbelievable wealth (he smiles with a
"purse-string puckering around the eyes") the name "Cash," rumors
notwithstanding, he has legitimately inherited from his mother's fam-
ily. Some more of his heritage conveniently explains his motives:
through his father's futile wage-slavery Cash has learned to disdain
company worship.

Having given him necessary credentials, the author enhances the
hero with a kind of parental authority. He owns most of the corpora-
tions in sight, including the one which has currently employed Gil
Clark. McCall has, in fact, secretly maneuvered that young man's
career into his own orbit. As for Suffolk Moulding, the company whose
disposition he presently controls, Cash McCall has only the most re-
sponsible intention. It turns out that young Gil Clark did not have any
problem at all. He only thought he did.

McCall merges Suffolk Moulding with two other properties he has
dramatically acquired, saving the stockholders including a medical
research foundation from ruin, and so demonstrates his superiority
to lesser-minded company men. His supra-business really nurtures
what it seems to prey on. The benign force comfortably ruling the
economic world, which depressed John Marquand's hero, has here
become a happy inevitability.

This novel celebrates earned income large amounts of it for its
own sake. Cash McCall even delivers a lay sermon, scolding Americans

170 The Denatured Novel

for their public discomfort over wealth. But faced with precisely this
discomfort in the public mind and wishing to justify profit, the novel-
ist trafficks in attitudes. The sanctioning doctrine of Good Works has
been at hand ever since Benjamin Franklin canonized the Arminian
Heresy. So Cash McCall, like his patron saint, does well by doing good.

The happy doctrine of profit through Good Works also explains
Cameron Hawley's earlier novel, Executive Suite, a splendid suspense
story with a little something for everyone. This book deifies the mate-
rialist, but so covertly that the reader is never offended by his own
appetite. The sudden death of Avery Bullard precipitates a crisis in the
furniture business. Which of the five vice-presidents of the Corpora-
tion will succeed the late Mr. Bullard to the presidency? The leading
contender is the controller, Loren Shaw, a relentless and aggressive
man dedicated to company profits.

Shaw is a money grubber, a conniving materialist, and the book
makes a heavy case against him, casting suspicion on all his motives.
The movement in the company to stop Lorcn Shaw quickly settles
on MacDonald Walling, the youngest of the vice-presidents. The ero-
sive battle between these two recalls the earlier, mannered contest be-
tween Charles Gray and the man he thought he had to beat. In this
one, however, Don Walling triumphs much more theatrically. He wins
the directors' votes at a show-down with Shaw by an impassioned
speech which states the theme of the novel or seems to.

Walling's convictions are not at first entirely clear. He damns Mam-
mon, specifically Loren Shaw's priority of stock dividends, he applauds
high-quality products and recognizes the employees as human, and he
promises new and greater growth for the Company. These comforting
attitudes seem safe enough. But the rhetoric of Mr. Walling disguises
some fortuitous illogic. Speaking in anger, he excoriates Avery Bullard,
who had had an eye on the profits, who had "been so busy building a
great production machine that he ... lost sight of why he was building
it/' Yet Walling earns the vote, after some talk of making newer and
better furniture, by promising to build an even bigger company.

This young man surely offers the directors the image of his predeces-
sor. But at the time the author throws the switch, after Walling's
rhetoric, the directors scarcely realize that a vote for Walling is a vote

After Marquand, the Deluge 171

for Shaw. This fact becomes magnificently clear when the visionary
Walling appoints Shaw, the money-man, to the new executive vice-
presidency, explaining: "I'll need somebody to help me keep my feet
on the ground."

Further evidence of this union of purpose presumably too complex
never reached the movies. In the film Loren Shaw bitterly concedes
defeat, but not in the novel. Perceiving that Walling's presidency will
be the best for Tredway and for its dividends, Shaw is among the first
of the voters to throw his support to the young man. All's well with
the company. The new president has sold a bill of goods. Unlike his
adversary he has managed to present his materialism not merely as a
matter of profit but as a mission to be celebrated. What counts with
the directors is the moral hocus-pocus which disguises the materialism
in the first place.

Slick fiction, John Marquand's included, contrives to make it easy
for the hero to take what is coming to him. What comes is material
well-being. But these later novels differ from their predecessor by re-
nouncing the uncomfortable sense of compromise and by presenting
instead some justification for the hero's happy retribution. The most
striking example of such expedience is Sloan Wilson's The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit.

Like Point of No Return this tale begins in authenticity, telling the
problems of a pleasant young man with his attractive wife and their
average children, living in a normal, hectic world. Tom Rath has two
problems, professional and private, which equally urge him on to self-
discovery. Professionally, he must decide whether or not to be a busi-
nessman to commit himself to executive endeavors in the communi-
cations industry or to find a less demanding job which will offer dig-
nity and spare time. Privately, he must decide whether or not to tell
his wife about his paternity of an illegitimate child in Italy during the
war. In the manner of a morality tale, each problem offers the hero
neat and exclusive alternatives.

And he decides: professionally, to abandon the chance to be a gladi-
ator and to accept the lesser job; privately, to tell his wife about his
illegitimate son, and to secure her blessings in settling an annuity upon
the lad. But as it turns out, the hero has had no problem at all, because

172 The Denatured Novel

he could afford, in each case, to make the morally preferable decision.
In the novel's most revealing sentence, Tom Rath perceives that
"money is the root of all order." Since he has inherited his grand-
mother's estate before having to decide his problems, his choices have
none of the moral significance proclaimed for them. The hero has
merely had to wait for circumstances to make it easy.

In this parody of Virtue Rewarded the reward comes first, and the
author's contrivance makes a caricature of the benevolent society.
When Tom Rath's legacy appears doubtful because of a counter-claim,
for instance, a probate judge goes out of his way to investigate the other
claimant and to discover his dishonesty. The villagers, in effect, en-
dorse a drastic exception to the zoning laws, allowing Tom the oppor-
tuity to turn his inherited land into a profitable development. Finally,
when the hero denies the business opportunity offered him, even
chastising his boss in the process, that unbelievably tolerant benefactor
obtains for the hero a life-time sinecure.

It is all so appallingly easy. The novel scarcely honors its publisher's
claim that it speaks for a whole generation. On the contrary, this hero's
endowments are so special and his society's dispensations so tailored to
his needs, that his gray flannel suit would not fit anyone else.

Stylization exaggerates gestures and attitudes. Each of these novels
offers a comparative, and some a superlative, to what John Marquand
has set down. Competition for the top job is more erosive, more ob-
viously dramatic in Executive Suite; the hero is more willfully passive
in Sloan Wilson's novel; and the company more specifically paternal
in The Power and the Prize, yet dwarfed in Cash McCall by an eco-
nomic force above and beyond even the corporation. In short, whatever
the problem, it is more urgent in these eclectic novels.

These stylized attitudes are rendered by stylized conventions. The
author's chore is to dispose satisfactorily of the hero's problem; or the
other way around, to make it seem for awhile as though the hero has a
problem. It is the same either way. Some evidence need only be planted
early in the story, which the climax can then recall in reversing the sit-
uation. This is the "gimmick" in the magazines and the movies.

John Marquand plants his evidence for the climax of Charles Gray's
struggle in a long, detailed flashback. This is Marquand's most promi-

After Marquand, the Deluge 173

nent convention. The hero's past is the majority of the novel, and the
whole of it is the evidence for the way things suddenly turn out. These
latter novels by the other authors, however, stylize the effect of sudden
reversal by leaving out the past which precedes it. The climax is more
sensational that way, less mundane and more dream-like.

In Point of No Return the hero's success is decided for him because
this is the way it has been all his life. The sequence of events accounts
for this apparently incontestable logic. Marquand introduces the prob-
lem in the narrative present, then suspends it for a thorough and pains-
taking exploration of Charles Gray's past, during which the hero is
seen time and again abiding by accepted conventions of behavior.

Growing up in a small town, Gray conducts a courtship across the
tracks and then dutifully abandons it. He conforms to the accepted
image of a young man in a brokerage house, even playing the stock
market conservatively in an era of wild speculation. He repeatedly con-
templates the joys of unconventional behavior, yet keeps his thoughts
to himself. Tempering his private observations with public good sense,
he earns the complaisance and benediction of friends and employers.
This pattern repeats itself so often, throughout the middle half of the
novel, that when Marquand resumes the problem of the vice-presi-
dency, he has already and repeatedly signaled its resolution.

The narrative past has determined the narrative present. Charles
Gray's conservative honesty in deference to the system is bound to win
the system's approval. Once you know the past, granting a consistent
character, there is no present problem. What at first appeared prob-
lematic turns out to be merely a foregone conclusion. So it is with
H. M. Pulham and George Apley, in fact with most of Marquand's
heroes.

Marquand manages a convincing surprise by making the evidence
so obvious that the reader takes it for granted. The problem has appar-
ently solved itself; it is a kind of optical illusion. This surprise by illu-
sion is precisely the quality in Marquand's narrative method which
succeeding novels have exaggerated. By a kind of fictional shorthand
they have abridged the past tense, which in Marquand's novels solves
the present problem.

None of these latter heroes has a past in the sense of a history al-

1 74 * lie LJenaiurea i\ ova

ready resolved. Except for fragmentary flashbacks identifying the char-
acters, these novels remain continuously in the present. They have
abridged that part of the narrative which accomplishes the solution,
but they must still fulfill the fictional requirement of a conflict solved,
They must come out even at the end. So instead of solving the problem
they dissolve it.

This tour dc force is like the solution to a puzzle, and just about as
significant. Sloan Wilson's hero did not have to work at a distasteful
job in order to support two families; he only thought he did, until his
inheritance made everything dreadfully easy. Gil Clark, in Cameron
Hawlcy's novel, merely thought the brokerage of corporations was
malevolent, until Cash McCall revealed the truth. Don Walling never
challenged the primacy of company dividends, in Executive Suite; it
just took a little time for him to reveal himself as a more imaginative
money-man than his adversary. And was there ever any doubt that the
directors would endorse Clcve Barwick's high-principled courtship?
Only by assertion.

The difference between John Marquand's patently logical solution
of a problem and the mere illusion of the problem in the first place
also makes the difference between an attitude and the commercial ex-
ploitation of it. These latter books all say less than they seem to. By
dismissing the problems they have posed they disqualify the attitudes
these problems seem to have produced. The greater the exaggeration
in the first place, therefore, the more obvious the fake. In the extreme
this affliction reduces a novel to saying nothing of its own.

The fifth and most recent in this cluster of business novels, George
DeMare's The Empire and Martin Brill, reaches this point of ob-
livion. It tells of five employees in the public-relations department of a
vast and anonymous organization. This nameless corporation, which
sells an unknown product, is called merely "the Company," "the Sys-
tem," or "the Empire."

During World War II, the time of the story, the Empire's public-
relations problem is to broadcast its vital importance to the national
war effort. Its headquarters occupy a skyscraper in a large Eastern city,
and the nerve center of these headquarters is on the top floor. The
reader catches a glimpse of two vice-presidents, one floor below, mys-

After Marquand, the Deluge 175

teriously referring to the "Old Man/' but that is as close as anyone gets
to the soul of this system. According to the blurb on the paperbound
edition ( 1957), "it might be called the story of the successful 'company
man.' But it is also the story of hundreds of thousands of 'big company'
employees whose dreams are never fulfilled, who find themselves im-
prisoned in a treadmill of frustration/'

Of the novel's five case histories, one man commits suicide because
his mistress denies him. The second becomes an alcoholic, loses his
job, and tramps the streets. The careers of numbers three and four con-
tradict each other. Number three stands firm on a moral matter (like
Cleves Barwick in The Power and The Prize), gets promoted when
events turn out to justify his position, and passes from view to the upper
stories of the skyscraper.

Number four, who is morally dishonest, seeks preferment at the ex-
pense of his colleagues. When his connivance is discovered, the Empire
awards him a horizontal promotion, and he passes from view among
the lower stories of the skyscraper. The fifth man, Martin Brill, is the
hero only by deference of the novel's title. He is kicked around the
Empire and finally promoted to the chair of the man who first hired
him. But on the way to this promotion he has suffered battle fatigue.

This schematization of the five characters accommodates the anony-
mity of the Empire. The only ruling force in the System is the irony of
denial. The successful executive kills himself, the dedicated company-
man gets fired. The employee who renounces preferment wins, and the
one who puts it before all else loses. Martin Brill, the man alleged to
have great expectations in the Empire, gets unaccountably shuffled
off into a minor job and exiled from headquarters. Then, having given
up, he unaccountably wins.

The anonymity, the irony, the lack of any cipherable plan, and the
boss nobody ever sees arc all symptoms of literary naturalism. More-
over, signs of earlier naturalists mark the final impression of this book.

There in the misty afterglow of the fading light, it towered like a huge
and shadowy fortress, heavy and sinister, rising out of the sea. It was
the Building the great, shadowy Building. It seemed to him, as he

1 j6 The Denatured Novel

stood there gazing at it from the distance, as if it 'were a symbol of the
whole vast Empire the granite stronghold of the mysterious powers
of the age fabulous, immense, and strange.

If you recall the static symbol of the Chicago Board of Trade Building,
with which Frank Norris concluded The Pit (1903), you might marvel
at the coincidence.

But this eclectic novel has also absorbed and exaggerated more re-
cent determinism. It capitalizes the "System" and in great detail in-
flates the concept of its benignity. "It was only an impersonal, cold
conglomeration of hundreds of thousands of unsentimental, common-
place people, machines and buildings, tracks and towers, lights and
voices; but somehow it was a solid thing, and it was there to stay." The
individuals within it are as nothing,

. . . but the Company which would see thousands like them come and
go, rise and fall, would endure, would remain there forever, substantial,
unchanging, powerful, enjoying a species of immortality, not as hu-
mans but as humanity itself, a monument to the creative force and en-
durance of collective men, no matter how mediocre and to the power
of human need.

Marquand's metaphor of the Stuyvesant Bank, the "head of living
coral rising above the surf, a small outcropping of a greater reef," offers
a comparable realization, but it is simpler and more dynamic. The
comparison between one man's metaphor and another man's catalog
suggests the entire relationship between these two novels.

Perhaps there were more salable attitudes for this latter novel to ab-
sorb. The "system" in it is more pervasive than in Point of No Return
and more impersonal than in Cash McCall. The retributions of the
Empire recall the rewards and penalties of the board of directors in
The Power and The Prize, although retribution no longer has any sense
of necessity, The Empire and Martin Brill attempts to show the
modus operandi of the big company. But the anonymity defeats this,

After Marquand, the Deluge 177

and the machinations degenerate instead into office politics, like those
in Executive Suite.

The Empire and Martin Brill is no copy. It is an original artifact.
The author's personal experience in just such an actual business cor-
poration, in fact, inspired his convictions. But he represented these con-
victions by literary conventions which served other needs in other
novels. His compendium consequently attracts no central or com-
pelling idea to his particular subject. Reading it is like wandering
through a hall of mirrors, seeing only the distorted reflection of other
books.

This particular cluster of economic novels is a small symptom of
a general condition in the book trade. The fiction of business has got
thoroughly mixed up with the business of fiction. Most other "profes-
sional" novels, as they are called about doctors or lawyers or police-
men, about Madison Avenue or Hollywood tell the same story. The
overproduction of fiction follows the elemental fact that a successful
book attracts more like it. Each new stylization is more like it than
the last.

There is no end to this subject, but what happens to the novel form
must be obvious. It deteriorates until some writer conceives of a novel
out of his own experience and organizes the actual chaos of things into
an ordered, complex whole which appraises the way of the world. He is
an artist. If he can write well enough and if he has unaccountable good
luck, people will talk about his book and even buy it.

On the strength of this, publishers will spot a "trend." Then the
whole dreary process will start again. A cluster of new novels will be-
gin to appear: packaged, advertised, some of them even written to ex-
ploit and exaggerate the characteristics of the original book, but always
contrived to attenuate it- This is all so terribly calculable, except for the
artist in the first place, thank God.

Chapter VIII

Arms and the Manner

THE human ideal of goodness has always had a hard time of it, which
explains why the triumph of virtue makes the headlines and why
fiction is so necessary. Conflict is a constant in fiction, but its local
metaphor changes, keeping up with the times. By mid-century in
America the most persistent local metaphor of the novel's conflict was
warfare for an obvious reason. So far in the twentieth century warfare
has been the most compelling denial of the idea of human efficacy in
God's world.

Contemporary book publishing has reflected this notoriety. In 1948
Publishers Weekly counted some 270 American novels whose subjects
involved World War II, many of them published before the war had
ended. While the total number of published novels was steadily
shrinking after V-J Day, the number of war novels began to increase;
1948 was a crucial year for war books. The large sales of Dwight Eisen-
hower's Crusade in Europe, Winston Churchill's The Gathering
Storm, and the early volumes of official military histories reflected
widespread interest. The fiction market throve on Norman Mailer's
sensational first novel, The Naked and The Dead.

Mailer's novel profited by an extraordinary advertising campaign.
A series of teaser ads in trade and review journals stimulated interest
many months before publication. Advance sales were high, and the
novel continued to sell: 137,000 copies through the trade in eight
months. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed 100,000 copies and
the Book Find Club another 64,000; and still the trade sales prospered,

Arms and the Manner 179

totaling over 200,000 by January 1951, when the novel appeared in a
papcrbound edition.

Later in 1948 Irwin Shaw's novel, The Young Lions, made almost
as much of an impression. It was distributed by the Fiction Book Club,
and the Post Hall Syndicate and Omnibook both purchased second-
serial rights. The significant fact in the sales of both novels was their
stamina in the market. It was three years before The Naked and the
Dead went into a paperback edition, and during this time 200,000
copies of the trade edition were sold. The sales of each novel in paper-
back now total more than 1 5,000,000 copies, and are still increasing.

In 1951, a few months after the publication of the paperbound edi-
tion of The Naked and the Dead, two other war novels appeared, with
even more conspicuous success. The Caine Mutiny (1951; 1954), by
Herman Wouk, sold over 200,000 copies through the trade in its first
nine months, and by the end of 1952 it had nearly doubled that total.
Its book-club distribution (by Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary
Guild, Peoples' Book Club, and Doubleday Dollar Book Club) was
unprecedented. The Caine Mutiny was also condensed for the Reader's
Digest Book Club, serialized in some forty-five newspapers, and
adapted to the stage for both Broadway and road-company produc-
tions; and like Shaw's and Mailer's novels it was filmed in the grand
manner. The other novel of 1951, James Jones's From Here to Eternity,
has sold more than 2,500,000 copies in reprint form. It was the first of
these four novels to be filmed, and on the strength of its film it has
achieved the largest sale of all of them in the shortest time.

For nearly ten years, beginning with the publication of Mailer's
novel, the new market steadily increased. There were all sorts of rea-
sons for it. Millions of Americans home from the war wanted to read
about themselves. The crisis of Berlin and the American airlift, and
then the police action in Korea made warfare imminent again. Even
more imminent was the film industry's capitulation to television, until
Hollywood successfully gambled on the wide screen in 1954. This last-
gasp invention created an urgent need for spectacular story material.
The war novel satisfied all of these interests.

One dissonant note occurred in this chorus of war novels, but at the
time it was not very loud. Ira Wolfert's An Act of Love (1948; 1955)

1 8o The Denatured Novel

had been published along with The Naked and the Dead and The
Young Lions. It was promoted as a "Big" war novel like the others, but
it did not share in their riches. The success of the other books had ap-
parently no effect on its sales. Ten times as many copies of Mailer's
novel were sold in eight months as were ever sold of Wolfert's novel.
Wolfert's trouble was that he saw the war as a problem in ethics by be-
lieving in the efficacy of his hero; and the relatively poor showing of
his book was prophetic.

But the four famous novels had tremendous effect. Even before
Hollywood's wide screen raised the profit in war fiction, the influence
of these four books became apparent on the lists of reprint publishers.
Reprinters began purchasing the rights to novels published before the
campaign of '48 and still in trade editions. The publishing dates of the
trade and reprint editions of Frederic Wakeman's Shore Leave (1944;

1948) represent a familiar pattern, and the pattern was still evident ten
years later with the belated reprinting of Lawrence Kahn's Able One
Four (1952) as The Tank Destroyers (1958) . These two reprints were
not among the very few which rescued novels worth saving, such as
Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun ( 1944; 1957) or The Gallery ( 1947;
1950), by John Home Burns.

The search for newly salable material reached even to the fiction
of World War I: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929;

1949) for instance, Soldier's Pay (1926; 1951) by William Faulkner,
William March's Company K (1933; 1958), and Eric Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; 1958). By suggesting to book
buyers a continuing tradition of war fiction these reissues of old titles
made useful advertising copy for the newer fiction of World War II
and the Korean conflict. Thus, the paperbound package of a Korean-
War novel by J. D. Hollands entitled Able Company (1956; 1958) ex-
plains in reviewers' jargon, that this " 'Great War Novel' . . . should
rank with Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front" a claim which
stretches a coincidence of subject matter beyond all reason.

The claim made for Hollands' novel is ludicrous. The only similarity
between the two books lies in the kind of war each represents. The war
in Korea, as in France more than thirty years before, was a war of posi-
tion, and the ground fighting in both became an erosive stalemate. But

Arms and the Manner 181

two novels about war could scarcely differ more than these do. Re-
marque's novel is selective and suggestive; Hollands' novel is a ful-
some encyclopedia of dreary details. This difference, however, did not
keep Hollands' reprinter from claiming fame by association.

This is a typical trick, especially when one reprinter has published
both of the novels on which the claim is based. The reprinter proclaims
Lionel Shapiro's The Sixth of June (1955; 1956) to be "The greatest
story of love and war since Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms"
which he also reprinted. Sometimes this little device is even laughable.
According to its paperback cover, Kenneth Dodson's Away All Boats
(1954; 1 95^) i s "The mightiest novel of men at war since Battle Cry"
which was originally published the same year. How could false infla-
tion be more modest than this?

Inflation is customary in this sort of claimed esteem. Battle Cry
(1953; 1954), by Leon Uris, "shares the greatness of From Here to
Eternity and The Caine Mutiny." Wirt Williams' novel, The Enemy
(1951; 1956), "Takes its place . . . beside The Caine Mutiny, and the
stories of Conrad and O'Neill." These likenesses belong to the advertis-
ing, not the book.

War and Peace is claimed among the credentials of The Sixth of
June, which is about like comparing The Origin of the Species with
Peter Rabbit. The borrowed esteem on the paper cover of Ross Carter's
actual account of paratroopers in Europe, Those Devils in Baggy Pants
(1951; 1952) "Not since The Naked and the Dead Mr. Roberts
or South Pacific has there been a book like this!" patently denies
the facts. The cover-claim of Lonnie Coleman's Ship's Company
(1955) blandly contradicts itself: "Action, danger and high passion in
a book that ranks with Mister Roberts." It is the old promotional de-
vice of trying to cash in on someone else's best seller. These false
claims might be dismissed were they not symptoms of the reason so
many books are published in the first place.

When the reprinter informs the customer that Robert Bowen's
Bamboo (1953; ^55) is "Compared to From Here to Eternity" he is
misrepresenting a literary idea. Bamboo is a short novel about a thirty-
day leave which a regular-Navy sailor spends in the shacks and bars of
Manila: drinking and brawling with his shipmates, living with a Fili-

1 8z The Denatured Novel

pino girl, and repenting his drunken brutalities. Glandular functions
and vague remorse entirely comprise this character, of whom the au-
thor makes no consequence. The only grounds for comparison with
Jones's novel are the excesses of a thirty-year man on peacetime duty
in the Pacific. Excess has some significance in Jones's novel, in the
claustrophobic lives of a dozen characters, but it leads to nothing in
Bamboo except the pale recollection of From Here to Eternity.

Mannerism in war fiction extends beyond the advertising to the
contents of the novels themselves. Most of the novels published after
those four which built the current market are startlingly similar to one
another, but they are similar in ways which their publishers would
rather not mention. Like all other books which swarm after a best
seller, these war novels exaggerate conventions which their predecessors
developed. As a result the book trade recognizes a conglomerate
product, published from time to time, which could be called the "nor-
mal" novel.

For the past ten or twelve years the normal war novel has been the
most familiar species of contemporary American fiction. Its properties
and the way they evolved, moreover, illustrate how the publishing in-
dustry hastens and formalizes the degeneration of a species. This de-
generation is similar to what has occurred in those clustered business
novels whose authors followed John Marquand to market. But there
are more factors involved in the degeneration of war novels.

The "normal" war novel is partly the result of a widespread obses-
sion for authenticity which the subject itself inspires, and partly the
result of the stylizing of certain fictional conventions. This conglomer-
ate product so obviously denies the possibilities of the novel form that
it bears looking into. Its gross authenticity prevents fictional develop-
ment and disqualifies the whole subject of moral choice; this can be
seen first by observing the characteristics of some normal novels. Then
it will be useful to notice the derivation of these characteristics, to in-
spect the conventions of earlier war novels which the normal novels
expediently distort.

First, to the characteristics themselves. The normal novel is a "Big
Book." It bulks large, it is heavily populated, and its subject is sen-
sational. It involves timely attitudes about emotional disturbance,

Arms and the Manner 183

sexual difficulties and racial problems. Nearly everything about its sub-
ject is excessive; even its manner is excessively ponderous. In the mis-
taken attempt to be "brutally honest/' as the ads say, it is excessively
literal.

The normal war novel is the saga of a group of private citizens assem-
bled for military training and gradually built into a fighting unit, im-
bued with camaraderie, and embarked for combat. When this group
finally meets the enemy, the citizen-soldiers test themselves at terrible
cost, and the whole erosive experience yields only a muted hope for the
few survivors. Most of the soldier-writers have the same significant
story to tell, with the same claim to authenticity and with the same
compulsion.

The first narrator in William March's Company K, one of the re-
vived novels about World War I, speaks for all soldier-authors. "I wish
there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge
wheel," he says, "each story hung on a different peg until the circle was
completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until
the things of which I have written took life and were re-created, and
became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, into each other;
blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an un-
ending circle of pain. . . ." He is obsessed with making a picture and a
sound of war which encompasses everything else.

This is the way it was, the author says. He was there and cannot be
contradicted. Both the strength and the failure of the normal war
novel proceed from this fact. The military units and the campaigns
which involved them are matters of public knowledge and give a cer-
tain signal value to the book. But the disadvantages of authenticity
are crippling. The immediacy of the author's subject can overwhelm
him, to the detriment of fiction. When the subject of war the denial
of human efficacy overwhelms the author, his novel has a hard time
convincing anyone. He can write only of determinism, and this contra-
dicts the nature of the novel.

The novel is a humanistic form. By simplifying chaos into conflict
it poses alternatives for its characters; it presents the possibility of
choice and turns action into consequence. This does not limit the
author to any particular attitude, happy or unhappy, but it does assume

1 84 The Denatured Novel

that the individual has a hand in the vast circumstances of cause and
effect. There is no such thing as a convincing deterministic novel. A
novel may argue determinism, which is quite another matter, but an
author overwhelmed by warfare can record only events without human
cause, which is just what happens in the normal war novel.

Authenticity cripples this stylized war fiction. It presupposes certain
kinds of characters, it dwarfs them in their setting, and it dictates a set
of attitudes conditioned by shock. These arbitrary conditions usually
make the characters unbelievable. The soldier-author came to know
the personnel and operations of some basic military unit: a squad, a
bomber crew, or a watch-section aboard ship; but he also met many
different kinds of men, far more than in any normal circumstances.
He feels the obligation to make his story universal, and so one way or
another he tries to confine his extensive, actual acquaintance to the
fictional version of the military unit he knows.

The actual citizen-soldiers have come from everywhere, representing
every human quality, sharing only their amateur status. Some belonged
to racial minorities, others were racists. Some grew splendidly, others
remained weak and ineffectual. Some were bestial, some ignorant, and
a few had quick, disciplined minds. They represented all regions and
every social class. William March's narrator states his case and, un-
wittingly, the problem. "This book started out to be a record of my
own company, but I do not want it to be that, now. I want it to be a
record of every company in every army/'

How do you achieve a fiction which represents this actual range of
human involvement in war? William March introduced 113 members
of Company K, each with his own story to tell. His novel is a congre-
gation of small voices, a succession of brief intimacies which leave only
the impression of bewildering sameness. With the same war but with
radically different proportions, John Dos Passos invested three fictional
soldiers with heavy symbolic value; so symbolic that they rarely be-
come individuals.

Somewhere between these extremes the normal novel of World War
II settles on a platoon cosmology. Some small, definable military unit
contains a few permanent tenants and a great many transients. Four or
five principal characters are carefully differentiated and then sur-

Arms and the Manner 185

rounded by a dozen or two dozen caricatures. The normal result is a
crowded procession of strangers: the brave officer or the cowardly offi-
cer, the shagbark sergeant with a deep sense of commitment, the Jew
who becomes a better soldier than his Gentile persecutors, the bully
and the bigot and the poet, the sensitive chaplain, and the cynical
doctor.

This is the cosmology in Leon Uris' novel, Battle Cry. The book is
an encyclopedic record of a radio company in the second Division of
the Sixth Marines: from civilian life, through boot camp and further
training, to combat in the Pacific War and the climactic battle in the
landings on Saipan, then back to civilian life. Despite the accumula-
tion of day-to-day details the characters never develop or change. In a
remarkable variety of circumstances each new disclosure merely man-
ages to reveal more of the same. The reader knows these individuals no
better than the author once knew their actual counterparts.

These characters demonstrate the sentimental assumption that hu-
man beings are good (with the author's solicitous attention most of
them decide in favor of chastity or marriage). Beyond this, however,
one can judge them merely as soldiers; excellent Marines, to be sure,
but nothing more. When some of them die, terribly and violently, the
fact has nothing to do with their individuality, but only with where
they happen to be when the enemy shell explodes. Because the reader
never knows them, he must respond to death or survival in merely
quantitative terms. Life and death in this novel evoke about as much
emotion as the lyric to 'Ten Little Indians."

The same cosmology marks another normal novel: Kenneth Dod-
son's Away All Boats ("The mightiest novel of men and war since
Battle Cry"). This novel tells of a war vessel, an attack transport, in
the Pacific theater. Through the small-boat officer and his crew the
novel introduces the rest of the ship's personnel: on the bridge, in the
ward room, by the landing net and on the beachhead. The confusion
and stress and misdirected energy of a landing operation are effectively
amplified by the dozens of walk-ons and extras engaged in haste and
violence, a fact congenial to the filming of the story in Vistavision.

The persons on this seascape are forever appearing about their busi-
ness and disappearing again, but they have no consequence. The ship's

i86 The Denatured Novel

Captain Hawkes becomes eccentric as the pressure mounts. He keeps
a pet monkey, for which he reserves all his intimate disclosures. He
commands his ship-fitter to build a sail boat, and scavenges the fleet for
red ink to dye its sails. His obsession for sunsets periodically paralyzes
him, and when he conns his ship in such a trance he nearly sinks it.
Hawkes is no character in his own right, but he is a pale reflection of
Herman Wouk's Captain Queeg. As in The Caine Mutiny much is
made of this eccentric man jeopardizing the entire command. Then
suddenly the narrative denies the conflict it has elaborately built up;
Hawkes sustains a brain concussion and dies in his bunk.

Executive Officer Quigley is another Queeg-like character who turns
out to be an anti-climax. He has made a career of evading responsibil-
ity. His deftness at this threatens to involve some of the junior officers
in a crisis with the captain, but in the events of the ship's last cam-
paign somehow nothing comes of it. Then, there is an ensign aboard
who schemes for favors at the expense of his colleagues, but after sev-
eral dark hints about his malevolence, the author excuses him from the
novel. These truncated characters all come to nothing. Events out-
grow them, and they have no cause and no effect.

The characters are casualties of the novel's limiting authenticity.
This book only pretends to be about human beings, while it makes
them merely components of a military unit. Its only necessity comes
from the chronology of military events, the sequence of landing opera-
tions from Makin to Okinawa; it stops only when the Navy has run
out of beachheads. Like Battle Cry (which was temporarily "the
mightiest novel of men at war") Dodson's book wages a war of attri-
tion on its characters.

The details of these books concenter events, not characters. This
explains the pervasive but unlocalized setting of the normal war novel.
All the training camps and ultimately all the beachheads are indistin-
guishable because events are reconstructed in terms of that great com-
mon denominator, military procedure: the officially prescribed method
of carrying out any operation. Procedure constitutes the setting of
these narratives regardless of their location.

Just as procedure prescribes the action of a soldier's life and all the
methods of his trade, so in these novels it guides the reader in the tech-

Arms and the Manner 1 87

nicalities of soldiering. Procedure is the basis of all military communi-
cation, the means by which the individual remains a part of his unit
and his unit a part of the entire organization. Military crises can best
be understood in the terms of procedure, particularly procedure gone
wrong, which is why it becomes such an insistent metaphor in these
novels.

Sometimes this metaphor accomplishes wonders. The Good Shep-
herd (1955), by C. S. Forester, tells the story of seventy-two hours in
an Atlantic convoy, sometime in 1942; it dramatizes the convoy's con-
tinuous battle with a pack of German submarines, seen from the bridge
of a destroyer. Details of the battle are refracted through the Captain's
mind: incessant trigonometry problems which jostle his recollections
of Ecclesiastes and Job, and earlier moments in the Captain's own life.
An interior monologue punctuates the narrative which advances by the
sequence of orders on the bridge and by conversations between vessels
on the TBS radio circuit. The counterpoint (of procedural informa-
tion and one man's recollections) makes a convincing picture, but
Forester's achievement was unusual.

The enabling metaphor of procedure more often interferes with the
characters, and burdens the story with irrelevance. The final episode
in Dodson's Away All Boats, after the ship has been hit by kamikazes,
necessarily becomes an urgent problem in damage control, but by then
it is too late to salvage the story. Too many earlier episodes have merely
demonstrated procedure for its own sake. Long before its climax the
novel has become an instruction manual.

Occasionally a novel, like Wirt Williams' The Enemy (1951; 1956),
exists exclusively in terms of procedure. This tells of the cruise of a
destroyer in a task group ordered to hunt Nazi submarines in the Atlan-
tic prior to the invasion of Normandy. It enlarges on the irony of
cruising 20,000 miles to achieve only an oil slick on the ocean the
only evidence of the enemy. But the fiction appears to exist merely for
the sake of demonstrating shipboard routine and the procedure of anti-
submarine warfare.

This demonstration specifies the details of a watch schedule, the
prescribed methods of steaming in formation and communicating be-
tween ships, relieving the watch and taking the conn, the mechanics

1 88 The Denatured Novel

of a search plan for an enemy submarine, the operation of the sonar
stack, and the arming and launching of depth charges. Everyone
mouths the same esoteric vocabulary of compass readings, commands
to the wheel, code names in the security procedure, and all of the con-
versational short-cuts between crew members. In his fascination with
these magic terms the author even stops to define the accepted kenning
for a bologna sandwich.

The Enemy thoroughly demonstrates the mechanics of bearing and
range without measuring anything human. Beyond their procedural
vocabulary the characters have no existence, but this is not even an
issue in the novel. First acquaintance establishes several facts: that the
executive officer has a wife and prefers merely to drink while on liberty,
that the captain is capable and has red hair, that the gunnery officer
likes jazz and gunnery problems, and that the cohabitations of another
officer become a public joke. This is all. Even the officer who hides in
the depth-charge locker and sucks his thumb is merely a more insistent
caricature than the others.

The paperbound edition of The Enemy quotes Ernest Hemingway
as saying, "A first-rate novel of the way it really was/ 7 That about sums
it up. The urgency to explain "the way it really was" can overpower a
fiction. It can dismiss cause and effect in favor of merely how it hap-
pened. Presumably the urgency in these ponderous narratives is the
imminence of death, but even here they contradict themselves.

Death in the normal novel convinces more than life does. The de-
tails of dying receive loving attention. The suppurating corpse and the
still-warm body punctured by a single bullet are meant to suggest the
range of horror, just as the typical characters are meant to suggest the
range of commitment, but the novels achieve only shock and contra-
diction. The soldiers with the most to live for die. They suffer death by
irony; and by this insistent fact these novels imply some force which
disqualifies moral being.

Occasionally a war novel that is not quite normal will make a point
of moral judgment. Fred Majdalany's Patrol (1953) demonstrates the
awful discrepancy between the terrors of the isolated few who are actu-
ally committed to battle and the many hangers-on behind the line. It
tells of a hazardous and unnecessary reconnaisance, ordered in effect

Arms and the Manner 1 89

by the headquarters mess officer who was anxious to please a general.
Among the patrol's casualties, the company's commander has fought
on the lines so long and so continuously that his body simply wears out,
unable to sustain a superficial leg wound. He dies by irony.

Ned Calmer's The Strange Land (1950; 1951) insists on the same
ugly comparison between the values of the combat soldier and the
values of the spectator. This novel describes an Allied attack upon the
Siegfried Line, launched under the worst possible conditions merely to
gratify a major general's personal and professional advancement. The
higher the rank and the farther away from the enemy, the more crim-
inally irresponsible men become.

A comparable but different crisis of morals occurs in Francis Irby
Gwaltney's The Day the Century Ended (1955; Between Heaven and
Hell, 1956). On the titled day, somewhere in the Philippine jungle,
the hero realizes the inadequacy of the chivalric ideal which his Na-
tional Guard commander has taught him. He has also learned to hate
the brutish cruelty of the American army and the prison company to
which he has been summarily transferred. The book makes no choice
between confused ardor and organized hatred, but disqualifies them
both in the hero's singularly moral concern over human behavior.

Still another narrowly defined case against warfare is Walt Sheldon's
Troubling of a Star (1953; 1954), about the American Air Force in
Korea. By the actions of three of its characters, two pilots and their
commanding officer, this novel evaluates the public concept of hero-
ism and finds it fraudulent. The brave pilot commits an act of compas-
sion for which he is grounded and branded a coward. The cowardly
pilot hides his own ineptness by commiting suicide in a dive attack on
an enemy tank by public standards an act of heroism. Their com-
manding officer, who has sought preferment with napalm bombs and
public relations, badly mistakes the courage of one pilot and the cow-
ardice of the other. Having seen enemy soldiers burning up after one
of his unit's missions, this colonel retires himself from service and
accepts a job with the church after first punishing the compassionate
pilot.

The novels of Sheldon, Gwaltney, Calmer and Majdalany are all
humanistic, having jettisoned the equipment of the normal war novel.

190 The Denatured Novel

They all happen to be negative in attitude, but that is beside the point.
Gwaltney's is the best of them, although each one, in its narrow
didactic version of human failure, has abandoned the chance for anal-
ogy, for development. Ideally, the normal novel should be able to de-
velop its platoon-organization into a convincing system of analogies,
but this is a rare achievement.

Anton Myrer accomplished it in The Big War (1957; 1958). This
novel carries the usual full pack: members of a squad in a marine com-
pany assigned to a landing operation on a Pacific island; episodes in the
lives of three of these soldiers, from their terminal leaves in the United
States, during their passage across the Pacific, through their beach-
head landing to the final days of the battle on the island. Yet Myrer
has achieved something different from the mere shock and denial of
the normal war novel. The experiences of his three main characters
dramatize a growing perception of moral man and the cost of morality.

In The Big War the son of a Greek millhand, an ebullient Irishman,
and a proper Bostonian reveal disparities in the presumed New Eng-
land conscience. The moral man is Danny Kantaylis, the millhand's
son. This Greek has gone over the hill to marry a girl who carries his
child and the burden of her mother's neurotic hatred of him. He has
already refused a veteran's privilege of retiring to an easy duty with
war-bond rallies, and he returns to camp to suffer imprisonment and
beatings for his absence-without-leave so that he can rejoin his squad
to go overseas.

Outward bound on a spaceless, impressionistic voyage across the
Pacific, the men in this squad begin to emerge, refracted through the
disdainful consciousness of the Bostonian, Alan Newcombe. Broken in
rank Kantaylis will nevertheless lead the men; and his over-developed,
uncompromising, and ultimately fatal sense of responsibility begins to
dawn on Newcombe. The refraction of this through Newcombe's mind
is the burden of the book. As this young patrician gropes toward some
understanding of Kantaylis' excessive commitment, he begins a confes-
sional to the girl he took to bed for one night and never saw again :
letters written but not mailed, composed but not written a painful,
ludicrous spectacle by which Newcombe grows a capacity to feel and
to love.

Arms and the Manner 191

The narrative bears out Newcombe's struggle over the terms of the
:omplicity between man and God. The battle repays the soldiers in
:ind. With the squad cut off in the jungle, Kantaylis leads an impos-
ible counter-offensive against an enemy tank, which he destroys even
is it destroys him. Newcombe's final perception of this act of compas-
;ion precedes his own violent death. Among the squad's survivors,
ilong with the bestial mortals whose ignorance of compassion has in-
;ured their safety, are several slow but educable men and Jay O'Neill,
vho perceives instinctively what Newcombe had to struggle to learn.

Back home, in The Big War, the next-of-kin offer the same bewil-
lered motley of response to the fact which governs this fictional world:
:hat the moral man's commitment kills him. Compassion saves the
Awld, yet it cannot preserve itself against what it saves. As in Kantay-
is' death and in the birth of his natural child, compassion begets life
then dies in the birthing. Like any war novel, The Big War acknowl-
edges the ironies of death and life, but it also assumes the complicity of
the individual in the scheme of things. Its appraisal of the consequence
Df moral man, in a world at war or not, very nearly explains the ironies
it poses.

Most normal novels deny the participation The Big War demands.
They show sequence without consequence, violent death by merely
external means. Their characters demonstrate humanitarianism and a
capacity for misdemeanors, but none of the passion or the pride or the
purpose that cause tragedy. Most of them conclude, long before the
end, that human responsibility does not exist and that moral struggle
is irrelevant in the face of the implacable force of war. And worse, they
take inefficacy for granted.

These all are signs of mannerism. The normal war novel evolves by
the borrowing of literary conventions from previous novels. These con-
ventions can make a book superficially similar to a predecessor enough
for advertising purposes but they make no sense by themselves; the
argument which would validate them has been left out. The enabling
dialectic of these mannered novels exists not in themselves but in
earlier books. Most contemporary soldier-authors have thoroughly ac-
cepted their predecessors' tentative conclusions, and what were once
thematic characteristics have become ornamental.

1 90 The Denatured Novel

They all happen to be negative in attitude, but that is beside the point.
Gwaltney's is the best of them, although each one, in its narrow
didactic version of human failure, has abandoned the chance for anal-
ogy, for development. Ideally, the normal novel should be able to de-
velop its platoon-organization into a convincing system of analogies,
but this is a rare achievement.

Anton Myrcr accomplished it in The Big War (1957; 1958). This
novel carries the usual full pack: members of a squad in a marine com-
pany assigned to a landing operation on a Pacific island; episodes in the
lives of three of these soldiers, from their terminal leaves in the United
States, during their passage across the Pacific, through their beach-
head landing to the final days of the battle on the island, Yet Myrer
has achieved something different from the mere shock and denial of
the normal war novel. The experiences of his three main characters
dramatize a growing perception of moral man and the cost of morality.

In The Big War the son of a Greek millhand, an ebullient Irishman,
and a proper Bostonian reveal disparities in the presumed New Eng-
land conscience. The moral man is Danny Kantaylis, the millhand's
son. This Greek has gone over the hill to marry a girl who carries his
child and the burden of her mother's neurotic hatred of him. He has
already refused a veteran's privilege of retiring to an easy duty with
war-bond rallies, and he returns to camp to suffer imprisonment and
beatings for his absence-without-leave so that he can rejoin his squad
to go overseas.

Outward bound on a spaceless, impressionistic voyage across the
Pacific, the men in this squad begin to emerge, refracted through the
disdainful consciousness of the Bostonian, Alan Newcombe. Broken in
rank Kantaylis will nevertheless lead the men; and his over-developed,
uncompromising, and ultimately fatal sense of responsibility begins to
dawn on Newcombe. The refraction of this through Newcombe's mind
is the burden of the book. As this young patrician gropes toward some
understanding of Kantaylis 7 excessive commitment, he begins a confes-
sional to the girl he took to bed for one night and never saw again :
letters written but not mailed, composed but not written a painful,
ludicrous spectacle by which Newcombe grows a capacity to feel and
to love.

Arms and the Manner 191

The narrative bears out Newcombe's struggle over the terms of the
complicity between man and God. The battle repays the soldiers in
kind. With the squad cut off in the jungle, Kantaylis leads an impos-
sible counter-offensive against an enemy tank, which he destroys even
as it destroys him. Newcombe's final perception of this act of compas-
sion precedes his own violent death. Among the squad's survivors,
along with the bestial mortals whose ignorance of compassion has in-
sured their safety, are several slow but educable men and Jay O'Neill,
who perceives instinctively what Newcombe had to struggle to learn.

Back home, in The Big War, the next-of-kin offer the same bewil-
dered motley of response to the fact which governs this fictional world:
that the moral man's commitment kills him. Compassion saves the
world, yet it cannot preserve itself against what it saves. As in Kantay-
lis' death and in the birth of his natural child, compassion begets life
then dies in the birthing. Like any war novel, The Big War acknowl-
edges the ironies of death and life, but it also assumes the complicity of
the individual in the scheme of things. Its appraisal of the consequence
of moral man, in a world at war or not, very nearly explains the ironies
it poses.

Most normal novels deny the participation The Big War demands.
They show sequence without consequence, violent death by merely
external means. Their characters demonstrate humanitarianism and a
capacity for misdemeanors, but none of the passion or the pride or the
purpose that cause tragedy. Most of them conclude, long before the
end, that human responsibility does not exist and that moral struggle
is irrelevant in the face of the implacable force of war. And worse, they
take inefEcacy for granted.

These all are signs of mannerism. The normal war novel evolves by
the borrowing of literary conventions from previous novels. These con-
ventions can make a book superficially similar to a predecessor enough
for advertising purposes but they make no sense by themselves; the
argument which would validate them has been left out. The enabling
dialectic of these mannered novels exists not in themselves but in
earlier books. Most contemporary soldier-authors have thoroughly ac-
cepted their predecessors' tentative conclusions, and what were once
thematic characteristics have become ornamental.

192 The Denatured Novel

Tracing back along this line of descent is not very difficult. Most
normal war novels stylize the books which created the contemporary
market: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, and From Here
to Eternity. Each of these earlier books has a dialectic. Each searches
out the cause of inefficacy and argues determinism. These books, in
turn, develop an argument which already existed in John Dos Passos'
novel, Three Soldiers, which is the archetype of most contemporary
war novels.

Military organization grinds Dos Passos 7 three soldiers to extinction
without regard for their defiance or their futile self-indulgence. All
three have joined the AEFs crusade to France in the Great War. But
the war ends halfway through the book, and the Army which preceded
the war and which remains after it is the force which crushes them.
One soldier remarks of their common plight, "It's part of the system.
You've got to turn men into beasts. . . ,"

The force categorically denies their ambition to be persons. The sol-
dier who merely wants to make corporal and to lead a squad against
the enemy contracts a venereal infection; he is court-martialed, sen-
tenced to a labor battalion, and assigned to permanent KP. Another
soldier wants to distinguish between his obligation to the Army and
his right to deny the sadism of its petty officials. But the system goads
him into murdering his immediate adversary, and he spends the rest of
his short life as a fugitive. The third soldier responds to the system's
organized pieties ("which glorify personal greed and fear and hatred")
by deserting ("to join the forlorn men, to throw himself into enviable
defeat, to live life as he saw it in spite of everything"). He is hunted
down and consigned to a brutal and permanent captivity.

The novel specifies each individual's complicity in his own downfall.
Each soldier in his way realizes his partnership with circumstance. But
the action is refracted successively through the minds of these victims,
so the most obvious impression is the blame of the system. The Army's
arbitrary denial is so consistent, and chance is so prevalent, that the in-
dividual's plight seems utterly insecure.

Contradiction rules this particular world. Warfare itself is inconclu-
sive, and death by combat is ironically incidental. The only deaths
made much of in the book are a murder, a suicide, and a heart failure

Arms and the Manner ' 193

(suffered by a recruit who dies in bed, having refused to answer mus-
ter). The military enemy is scarcely seen, but the omnipresent enemy
is the Army. When a company clerk, a Jew named Eisenstein, says as
much about the system's need to turn men into beasts he is court-
martialed for his disloyalty. He has already been tried by the rest of
his outfit and found guilty of being a Jew, a contributing factor to his
later indictment.

The normal war novels of the present generation have updated the
irony of Three Soldiers in a peculiar way. They insist on a similar denial
of the individual, but they ironically overlook the fact that each of Dos
Passos' three soldiers complies in his own downfall while blaming the
system. They faithfully exaggerate the details but ignore the reason in
them. Thereby they contradict the whole contention of Three Soldiers
that the individual is the agent of his own dereliction.

This has happened by stages. The best sellers which established the
contemporary market The Naked and the Dead and The Young
Lions exaggerated certain features in Three Soldiers. All three novels
document events which defeat the individual, but Mailer and Shaw
make a deterministic theory of it; and both create a dialectic about the
individual and the sovereignty of the system. Their dialectics are so
ponderous, however, that later novels have merely exaggerated the
symbols and the narrative details and left out the thesis. What has
happened, therefore, is determinism by default.

The Naked and the Dead and The Young Lions are the most doc-
trinaire of all contemporary war novels. The determinism of The
Naked and the Dead is primarily secular. This novel tells of the inva-
sion of a Japanese-held island; its principal characters are a general, a
lieutenant, and the members of an intelligence-and-reconnaisance
platoon. For each character the author has thematically joined past and
present by a device he calls "The Time Machine": ten impressionistic
biographies (in the present tense) which punctuate the narrative (ren-
dered in the past). The war merely intensifies whatever it is that has
already limited each individual. From this unpleasant past each char-
acter brings to the war a kind of undirected dislike which grows under
new pressures into casual hatred.

But the accumulated past is only a secondary cause of dehumaniza-

194 The Denatured Novel

tion. Something called "the medium" is the prime cause and the
subject of the most speculation. The lieutenant sees his own analogy
in the floating seaweed, the giant, rootless kelp which absorbs its
nourishment from the medium around it. The general tries to find a
metaphor of life and death in the trajectory of an artillery shell the
asymmetrical parabola, rising gradually and abruptly falling. The "re-
sistance of the medium" the atmospheric pressure causes the sud-
denness of the fall. But the general tries to apply this metaphor to all of
experience: the resistance of the medium causes an abrupt descent
analogous to the "tragic curve." Whatever "the medium" is it cannot
be controlled.

At this point the unresolved speculation drifts back into the narra-
tive, which "proves" the general's analogy. Nothing that happens to
end the campaign or the lives of the characters has anything to do
with human cause. A fatal patrol action turns out to have been unnec-
essary in view of a victorious frontal attack, but the attack itself has
succeeded because an ignorant staff officer has mistakenly deployed his
troops. This particular military operation has merely intensified the
denial of one's own efforts; it has merely sharpened all of the unfocused
groupings without relieving or changing a thing.

The Young Lions also insists on an unknowable determining force.
The book is less oracular than Mailer's, but it obviously contradicts
itself. Shaw invokes a vindictive statement from the Old Testament
book of Nahum, in which God promises to devour the young lions, the
war makers of the earth. But the execution of this promise in the novel
denies the justice of the Old Testament God.

The divine prophecy involves five young lions in particular: three
Germans and two Americans. One idealistic German becomes a
capable soldier and then a predatory animal; he is finally shot to death
without ceremony. Another German, a professional killer, loses his
face in an explosion and dies by suicide. The attrition of war itself
apparently validates God's prophecy and accounts for these two deaths.
But the story of the other young lions strangely qualifies the prophecy.
One of these is an American Jew assigned to an infantry company of
Southern Whites; he must fight even to live, let alone to find accept-

Arms and the Manner 195

ance. Then, having won his struggle at enormous cost, even as he cele-
brates the compassion of another human being, he too is killed.

This soldier is shot in the midst of his eulogy to "the human beings"
who will conquer the animals in the world. This is the novel's final im-
pression; it is no casual irony. Halfway through the book a German
soldier has similarly been murdered in the midst of his plan for peace
and his plea for humanity. "We have to show the world that there are
still human beings in Germany, not only animals," he says just before a
crazy series of events snuff him out. This illogic defies the God of
Nahum. The technicality of being a young lion apparently prevails
over the humanism of these two soldiers.

The only principal character left standing at the novel's conclusion,
in fact, has apparently escaped God's promise by his own ineptness. He
is like the uncommitted, ineffectual majority of men. He has enlisted
in the army to support a vague ideal and conveniently to escape his
domestic entanglements. Failing to become an officer, he has arranged
a transfer from hazardous duty, and his entire career is a record of aim-
less irresponsibility.

The scheme by which this man lives and the others die is impene-
trable. If the author intended this soldier to represent the Old Testa-
ment man divinely ordered to witness and believe, then he has bur-
dened the God of Nahum with unbelievable subtlety. This inept sol-
dier, by the structure of the novel, does not even know of the life and
death of most of the others. Some system of value based on chance or
implacable denial rules this fictional world. Like the unresolved mus-
ings of the general Mailer's spokesman in The Naked and the
Dead, the contradiction of The Young Lions focuses attention on
some nameless determining force.

James Jones's deterministic novel published three years later, con-
tains some vestiges of a dialectic. The agents of faceless force are the
generals who see "all men as masses, as numerical groups of Infantry,
Artillery, and mortars that could be added and subtracted and under-
stood on paper." So says the sergeant who contentedly regards himself
as "the instrument of a laughing Providence." Another soldier, a pri-
vate named Prewitt who has denied the Army's total claims upon him,

196 The Denatured Novel

tries to formulate the reason for his persecution: ". . . it was the system
that was at fault, blame the sysem. But he could not even blame the
system, because the system was not anything, it was only a kind of
accumulation, of everybody, and you could not blame everybody, not
unless you wanted the blame to become diluted into a meaningless
term, a just nothing."

As in Dos Passos' novel, this hard-headed private of James Jones has
complied in the events which bring him down and finally kill him; and
so have all the other characters: a soldier who gives up and resigns from
the system by accepting the charge of insanity; the sergeant who ex-
ploits the system for his own ends; the company commander who tries
to make a prudent show of conformity and fails. But the novel aban-
dons this humanistic premise, and buries it under a massive accumula-
tion of events which overtake the characters. The inefficacy of these
soldiers is just as much the subject of Jones's novel as it is of Mailer's
or of Shaw's, although Jones's Private Prewitt is more sophisticated
than the others, more informed about what will happen to him and
more willfully compliant, less enraged or bewildered. This reflects the
fact that Jones, unlike the other citizen-soldiers, belonged to the regu-
lar Army.

The economic importance of these three contemporary books antici-
pated the similarities of the normal novels that followed them. Battle
Cry, The Enemy, Away All Boats, Able Company, and dozens like
them all packed the same equipment without the reason for it: the
reportage, the heavy documentation of setting, the maze of procedure
which confines large numbers of small human beings as though de-
tails were intrinsically worthwhile. These stylized novels report the
facts of warfare without the heat of thought. They have no antago-
nism; they fail to search out the design of things because they have
abandoned any notion that the complicity between events and the in-
dividual might work both ways.

The war novel has calcified about as much as it can in Lawrence
Kahn's Able One Four. This book abridges the normal novels so effi-
ciently that it reads like an index. According to its paper cover it cele-
brates "an unheralded and heroic branch" of the service, as almost all
of them do. Its characters are the crew of an armored vehicle engaged

Arms and the Manner 197

in the Allied advance across Germany. After a glimpse at the crew
members, the author briefs the reader on the procedure of waging war
in a tank destroyer, then gets right to the climactic battle. It is all
very orderly.

Procedure rules this handbook and confines what passes for charac-
ters. Procedure is the insistent setting of the tank destroyer itself: "Ele-
vation six-four-eight," "left one-two-seven," "fire for effect," "up five
hundred"; "Super wants you at oboe time. Repeat, oboe time. Over.";
watchword and countersign, H.E. and A.P. shells; "TOT starts at zero
five four five"; K-rations and "five-in-ones," and "bedcheck Charlie";
"Wilco, out."

There is not much else to say about the five enlisted men and their
lieutenant. The college graduate suffers from battle fatigue, has bad
dreams, and obsessively writes letters to his wife. A more well-adjusted
member of the crew has no wife and did not go to college. As for the
others, the lieutenant is overworked, the coward is unpleasant, and
the "tight-lipped" sergeant benignly rules the crew. The last man is a
replacement, an "innocent kid" who diligently learns his new job as
gun loader. When the tank destroyer finally gets shelled, there is a
characteristic irony about the destinies of its crew: the college man
goes into shock, the coward gets off with a flesh wound, and the inno-
cent youngster violently dies; his corpse on the road beside the tangled
vehicle the book's final impression literally fulfills the epigraph on
its paper cover: "Blood . . . guts . . . and hot steel!"

Able One Four is legion on publishers' lists. This abridgement of the
normal novel is about ciphers, not people; it is an extremity of literary
naturalism, but not the only one. This tyrannous fashion even sub-
jugates novels which start out to be humanistic. The Good Shepherd,
by C. S. Forester, is typical of the contradiction. This is the book which
makes procedure so convincing, but it ends up with some unassimi-
lated second thoughts which deny the narrative itself.

The problem of getting the convoy through, in The Good Shepherd,
lies with the escort commander; the narrative makes this clear. His
skill and training and sense of responsibility oppose a formidable yet
equally human enemy. Although the issue is in doubt, the terms of the
battle are finite, even professional. This scarcely fits the attitude which

198 The Denatured Novel

has sold so many war novels, but Forester's conclusion makes amends.
At the end of the convoy the captain throws himself on his bunk while
his exhausted mind sums it all up: "Chance the chance that elevated
a paranoiac to supreme power in Germany and a military clique to
power in Japan dictated that when it was too late he should receive
the coveted promotion to commander, if it can be called chance." No
ending could deny its narrative more arbitrarily than this one does.
"Chance had made him an orphan; chance had brought about the
senator's nomination. Chance had put him in command of the convoy
escort. Chance had made him the man he was and had given that man
the duty he had to carry out."

Stylizing has caused the scarcity of humanistic war novels even un-
convincing ones. Putting characters into situations for the sake of situ-
ations deprives the characters of cause and effect; it forfeits their
responsibility in what happens to them. The more a given novel is
concerned with human complexity, therefore, the more its caricature
is likely to deny it.

The most influential of the war novels posing an ethical problem has
been Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. It so happens that Wouk's
novel also disqualifies the ethical problem he poses. He built a shrewd
combination of acceptable attitudes, more adroitly than C. S. Forester
later did, but The Caine Mutiny is at least based on the human capa-
bility of causing or avoiding a particular crisis. Because of its tremen-
dous commercial success it was later caricatured just as strenuously as
were the novels of Mailer and Shaw and Jones. And the stylizations of
Wouk's ethical novel were just as deterministic as the normal war
novels turned out to be.

Despite all the books unreasonably likened to The Caine Mutiny
one obvious choice has gone begging. This is Martin Dibner's novel,
The Deep Six (1953; 1954)- The same publisher issued both books a
year apart. Dibner's book is an obvious case of total recall, and the
publisher must have felt he could not serve the sales of either novel by
advertising this fact. Superficially, Dibner's book is more like The
Caine Mutiny than The Caine Mutiny is. It exaggerates every pre-
dominant characteristic of its predecessor and therefore arrives at a
totally different state: it is a gross caricature of mechanical men.

The Caine Mutiny offers a case history of Commander Queeg, a

Arms and the Manner 199

ship's captain burdened by bad luck, incompetence, and the symptoms
of mental illness. His officers build their grievances into a convincing
case for relieving him of his command. After the executive officer has
accomplished this legal mutiny he is acquitted in a court of law
through the shrewd tactics of his defense attorney. Then the novel
suddenly turns on itself.

The defense attorney indicts the ship's officers for their moral tres-
pass, but for reasons irrelevant to the trial or to the narrative. The
defense attorney is a Jew with grievances against the Nazis, who boiled
his mother into soap. He ignores Queeg's pathology for his own. He
applauds all the Queegs, all of the professional soldiers who stood
guard against the Nazis while these reserve officers were leading a fat,
happy life.

Wouk's spokesman indicts the mutineers on the ground that they
are accountable for their irresponsibility a condition from which he
pardons Oueeg at the same time. Either his pardon or his indictment
is illogical. Actually, the author has shuffled his attitudes so that nearly
everybody wins. All of the major characters get an endorsement and a
reprimand. The novel's only major casualty is the enlisted man whom
Queeg has driven insane.

Certain situations in the narrative of this ethical problem have un-
dergone an obvious sea change in The Deep Six. They have become
bloated. Instead of an ancient destroyer, the ship in the latter book is
an ancient cruiser; it floats more incompetence, more sadism, and more
tyranny than the destroyer. A curious thing happens to the demonic
qualities. The cowardice, the vindictive cruelty, the mental illness and
moral trespasses implied of Queeg are multiplied in the latter novel;
they become explicit in the persons of four different officers in Dibner's
book.

The captain of this cruiser has no concept of his own command, and
like Oueeg he is suspected of incompetence by his superiors. The gun-
nery officer, like Quccg, is an outright coward. The executive officer is
a psychopathic hater; like Queeg he issues degrading commands for the
sake of personal reprisal, and like Queeg he is relieved of his duties. The
malevolence which Queeg's character implies becomes a fact in the
character of an ensign aboard the latter ship.

Violence is always threatened aboard the Caine, but it explodes

200 The Denatured Novel

aboard the cruiser. Racism is only a belated topic in Wouk's novel,
merely asserted after the mutiny and left undeveloped, but the perse-
cution of a Negro become a major factor in Dibner's book. Homosexu-
ality is insinuated in The Caine Mutiny, in Queeg's persecution of his
helmsman; Wouk used it to establish the complexity of Queeg's para-
noia. But in The Deep Six homosexuality is a blatant fact; an officer's
trespass upon an emotionally disturbed enlisted man embellishes that
novel's climax.

The exaggerations multiply wherever you look. Wouk tells a separate
story in the love affair of the junior officer who survives the court-mar-
tial to become the Game's last captain. To satisfy his mother he has
forsaken a girl whom he later decides he loves. This story measures the
man's growing up.

The love story in The Caine Mutiny is a way of giving the character
credentials, for it is his reflections on the mutiny which are allowed to
stand. But the love story in The Deep Six, also involving a girl from
across the tracks, exists merely for itself. Her body is simply one of the
many temptations in the way of virtue. The junior officer is also a
painter who is tempted by the financial gain of drawing cheap illustra-
tions, and he is a Quaker deeply involved in the hatred aboard ship.
But he has already made up his mind before the novel starts: he stands
resolutely for painting, marriage and good will. It is ever so easy and
unconvincing.

All of these exaggerations lose point in the second novel. The Caine
Mutiny is concerned with the nature of its central character, and it
presents a crisis of moral responsibility. But The Deep Six merely
demonstrates a number of moral felonies. To be sure, Wouk resolved
a crisis to evferyone's advantage, but Dibner merely shocks; he offers
nothing to resolve. The gross irony of The Deep Six is that it has noth-
ing to fathom.

Dibner's stylization of The Caine Mutiny is on a par with Robert
Bowen's stylization of From Here to Eternity, in his novel called
Bamboo. Both Bowen's and Dibner's novels negate cause and effect;
they offer separate sensations but no sensational analogies of a conflict.
They negate the very properties by which a novel can appraise experi-
ence. There is only an academic difference between these books and

Arms and the Manner 201

Lawrence Kahn's Able One Four. Preceded by so many normal war
novels, Kahn's book employs conventions which were cliches to begin
with. But there is no point in comparing degrees of unbelievability.

Most normal novels exploit shock and denial, but do not develop it
to any avail. These novels offer sequence without consequence. For
that illusion of necessity which all fiction must have they depend
merely on details of actual experience and on the conventions of other
novels. Because they fail to make convincing characters they disqualify
the whole system of moral choice without which, why fiction?

All of these authors of normal war novels offer passive, abhuman
characters the better if passive, because if they act on their own they
are not human enough to make it believable. This particular species of
fiction shows no evolution of form. "Devolution" would suit it better.
The normal war novels, for the most part, breed abhuman characters in
an abhuman world.

Chapter IX

Just Deserts

THE BOOK TRADE denatures novels in an effort to sell more of them, and
publishers excuse themselves on the grounds that they cannot give the
people "better" than the people want. Publishers simplify their wares,
invest them with palatable attitudes, and make them easily digestible;
then they advertise them as vital and life-giving. But they cannot have
it both ways; a novel's vitality lies in its being complex enough to ap-
proximate life.

Most contemporary business novels and war novels commit this
fraudulent simplism. They are not the only offenders, but they are
representative. The normal war novel burdens the characters with
consequences they did not cause and cannot change. Because of the
incapacity of these characters nothing much is at stake. The system
prevails. With the metaphor of business instead of warfare, denatured
novels resolve the conflict more pleasantly but just as irrevocably in
favor of the system. The businessman is confined by the great corpora-
tion which employs him, but it is all for the best. The benevolent sys-
tem will take care of him.

Under the book trade's auspices these novels add witless authority to
such determinism. They create characters for ready-made situations
dictated by the success of previous books like the narratives, the char-
acters have been denatured. But there is even more to this denial of
moral struggle. The aim to gratify quickly makes a novel serve an atti-
tude. Thinned down to a narrative which must be resolved, the de-
natured novel is susceptible to any attitude. It becomes contrived, yet
this is what commercialism has forced upon writers.

202

Just Deserts 203

The peculiar task of the denatured novel is to furnish some expedient
reciprocity for all the excesses it contains in the first place. It is "moral,"
as the publishers say, because every character gets his just deserts. This
reciprocity masquerades as justice, which it is not; but like most in-
genious devices it will satisfy anyone who takes it for granted. The
device approximates an eye for an eye, but it exploits an astigmatism
in this old and tested retribution. What happens is more nearly an eye
for a tooth, which is something else again.

Expedient reciprocity, for example, is what makes The Caine Mu-
tiny come out even. Almost every character gets what is coming to him
even a little more for good measure, which is immediately satisfying.
The trick is to balance a character's debits and credits from all sources
and to pay him appropriately in a lump sum. This seems so obviously
tidy, and it avoids tedious delays of the sort actual people have to en-
counter.

Wouk's novel excuses Queeg for his trespasses on the grounds that
he is sick; it even applauds him for being a sick man who has stayed on
duty (although it only implies that the sickness was service-induced).
The book also indicts Lieutenant Keefer who has interpreted Queeg' s
irresponsibility to the rest of the officers and managed the charges of
mental illness against the captain. Keefer might be sick too (he is cer-
tainly obsessed with Queeg), but Keefer is held responsible as an indi-
vidual and Queeg is pardoned.

The book obscures this moral lapse by making punishment and re-
ward seem reciprocal. During the trial the defense attorney, Green-
wald, has just destroyed whatever esteem Queeg had, so in a fit of re-
morse he publicly does the same for Queeg's tormentor. He insults
Keefer by throwing a drink in his face and blaming him for the affair.
This insult does not justify Queeg any more than Queeg's defeat has
justified Keefer, but it gratifies the wish that everyone should get his
just deserts.

In order to make this reciprocity stick (and it does stick; Keefer is
overcome by a sense of defeat), the author must validate Greenwald
in some way. He invents a past for Greenwald (which has nothing to
do with Keefer) to justify Green wald's insulting somebody or other.
His Jewish mother in Germany was killed by the Nazis, so he trades

Chapter IX

Just Deserts

THE BOOK TRADE denatures novels in an effort to sell more of them, and
publishers excuse themselves on the grounds that they cannot give the
people "better*' than the people want. Publishers simplify their wares,
invest them with palatable attitudes, and make them easily digestible;
then they advertise them as vital and life-giving. But they cannot have
it both ways; a novel's vitality lies in its being complex enough to ap-
proximate life.

Most contemporary business novels and war novels commit this
fraudulent simplism. They are not the only offenders, but they are
representative. The normal war novel burdens the characters with
consequences they did not cause and cannot change. Because of the
incapacity of these characters nothing much is at stake. The system
prevails. With the metaphor of business instead of warfare, denatured
novels resolve the conflict more pleasantly but just as irrevocably in
favor of the system. The businessman is confined by the great corpora-
tion which employs him, but it is all for the best. The benevolent sys-
tem will take care of him.

Under the book trade's auspices these novels add witless authority to
such determinism. They create characters for ready-made situations
dictated by the success of previous books like the narratives, the char-
acters have been denatured. But there is even more to this denial of
moral struggle. The aim to gratify quickly makes a novel serve an atti-
tude. Thinned down to a narrative which must be resolved, the de-
natured novel is susceptible to any attitude. It becomes contrived, yet
this is what commercialism has forced upon writers.

202

Just Deserts 203

The peculiar task of the denatured novel is to furnish some expedient
reciprocity for all the excesses it contains in the first place. It is "moral,"
as the publishers say, because every character gets his just deserts. This
reciprocity masquerades as justice, which it is not; but like most in-
genious devices it will satisfy anyone who takes it for granted. The
device approximates an eye for an eye, but it exploits an astigmatism
in this old and tested retribution. What happens is more nearly an eye
for a tooth, which is something else again.

Expedient reciprocity, for example, is what makes The Caine Mu-
tiny come out even. Almost every character gets what is coming to him
even a little more for good measure, which is immediately satisfying.
The trick is to balance a character's debits and credits from all sources
and to pay him appropriately in a lump sum. This seems so obviously
tidy, and it avoids tedious delays of the sort actual people have to en-
counter.

Wouk's novel excuses Queeg for his trespasses on the grounds that
he is sick; it even applauds him for being a sick man who has stayed on
duty (although it only implies that the sickness was service-induced).
The book also indicts Lieutenant Keefer who has interpreted Queeg's
irresponsibility to the rest of the officers and managed the charges of
mental illness against the captain. Keefer might be sick too (he is cer-
tainly obsessed with Queeg), but Keefer is held responsible as an indi-
vidual and Queeg is pardoned.

The book obscures this moral lapse by making punishment and re-
ward seem reciprocal. During the trial the defense attorney, Green-
wald, has just destroyed whatever esteem Queeg had, so in a fit of re-
morse he publicly does the same for Queeg's tormentor. He insults
Keefer by throwing a drink in his face and blaming him for the affair.
This insult does not justify Queeg any more than Queeg's defeat has
justified Keefer, but it gratifies the wish that everyone should get his
just deserts.

In order to make this reciprocity stick (and it does stick; Keefer is
overcome by a S2nse of defeat), the author must validate Greenwald
in some way. He invents a past for Greenwald (which has nothing to
do with Keefer) to justify Greenwald's insulting somebody or other.
His Jewish mother in Germany was killed by the Nazis, so he trades

204 The Denatured Novel

on this deserved compassion by throwing a drink at the tormentor of
one of the men who opposed the Nazis. This all happens so quickly
that it hides the illogic, and the reader settles accounts at a tooth for
an eye.

This sort of pay-off never works in actuality, which is why it is so
satisfying in fiction. When a character accrues a large balance of credit
he can squander it all, if the author likes, in some violent attack upon
some other character; the more violent the pay-off the more satisfying.
In this way an author can excuse one excess by another and still main-
tain the pretense of being moral. But excess is the real subject.

Virtually every war novel trades on its subject; The Caine Mutiny
is conservative in this respect. War itself licenses dishonesty, violence,
and trespass. The novelist can declare himself impeccable simply by
claiming that this is the way it was; he is merely calling a spade a spade.
Peacetime mores are often irrelevant in wartime, so when he heeds the
call of the spade he can dig deeper in the dirt and get away with it. Or
so he rationalizes.

War does cauterize the routine experiences into which it cuts; no
doubt it is to be judged differently. But this does not relieve the novel-
ist of the need to make his situation believable. If anything it limits the
bounds of probability, but most war novelists do not see it this way.
Walt Sheldon's novel, Troubling of a Star, for example, obviously ex-
ceeds its license. This is a novel about the cowardly pilot and the brave
pilot and their commanding officer in Korea. It is pointedly didactic,
but this does not hide its indulgence. Of the five other characters in
the novel, two of the women arc nymphomaniacs and the third is pleas-
ingly amoral. One of the men ( the only enlisted man ) is a homosexual,
and the other is a black marketeer who keeps one of these imperious
women.

There, is plenty of violent reciprocity among these trespassers. The
homosexual is ground up and spit out of an airplane propeller; one
nymphomaniac murders her keeper and the other speeds the cowardly
pilot to his flaming death. The expedient violence evens out the debits
and credits, which clearly exist for the sake of the violence. This does
not even begin to convince, because the novel's selectivity is so obvi-
ously contrived. The world is simply not populated in this way.

Just Deserts 205

Excess is not limited to felony and perversion. Even chastity can be
too much. In Francis Gwaltney's war novel, The Day the Century
Ended, the soldier-hero indulges in a long recollection of his honey-
moon, of the consummation of his marriage, and of subsequent achieve-
ments of this union. This soldier's preoccupation is understandable,
but it does not happen to concern the action; it is gratuitous which is
one thing love ought not to be. Chaste or unchaste, any situation which
exists for its own sake is an extravagance no fiction can afford; it de-
stroys the whole proportion. From the total impression of any novel,
nothing secedes like excess.

The war novels have no monopoly on excess. That ultimate business
novel, The Empire and Martin Brill, by George DeMare, presents
the same sort of crapulence. This is the book in which the anonymous
corporation rules all of its employees. The blurb on its back paper cover
asserts there is another story in this novel, in the "heart and knowledge
of Martin Brill/' "fascinating, sardonic and perverse." This is an ac-
count of Brill's sexual experience with the "lovely April who could give
him her body but withhold her heart."

This marketese refers to the hero's frustrations over a woman who
would lie with him even as she reminded him of her charity. But the
"lovely April" has no other function. The flesh larded into this narra-
tive has no cause and shows no necessity. The "lovely April" is a paper-
bound heroine imposed on the story, and one reason why the book is so
scattered. She is unbelievable, which is her only connection with the
rest of the novel.

In the flood of business novels which deluged the market after Mar-
quand's Point of No Return, Cameron Hawley's Cash McCall gave a
special notoriety to the conflicts in buying and selling companies. This
subject in turn begat more derivative books, including some which
were not business novels at all but merely disguised to look like them.
John MacDonald's paperback original, Man of Affairs (1957), for ex-
ample, is incidentally about a raid on a company for the sake of manip-
ulating its stocks, jut the book's real subject is a violent house party in
the Bahamas at which the scoundrel tries to secure some signed proxies.

The extravagance of Man of Affairs includes bribery, blackmail,
fornication and violent death, all tricked up to seem as wholesome as a

206 The Denatured Novel

Girl Scout cookie. The excess is rationalized by expedient reciprocity.
The narrative keeps tabs on what every character has coming to him, so
that each excess apparently justifies another. For example, one un-
pleasant character gets ripped apart by a barracuda; and worse, he is
eaten up as a bonus for being beaten up by the hero.

It takes some India-rubber logic to justify this sadism, particularly
since his only misdemeanors were insulting his wife and then the
hero. But the extravagant pay-off is arranged in easy stages. This un-
pleasant character wanted to embarrass the hero after that stalwart had
beaten him up so he went skin diving with the barracuda; he had been
beaten up because he had picked the fight; and he had picked the fight
in the first place to justify his having insulted the hero (this was his
real mistake committing two misdemeanors in a row, without letting
the hero have his turn ) .

This travesty on retribution typifies the paperback violence on sale
in every cigar store. It is a peculiar derivative of journalism and slick
magazine fiction sold in the same store. Journalism is a point of view
as well as a technique of writing. It is a kind of selectivity. The reporter
chooses a timely subject; more important, he stresses whatever is un-
usual about it he finds an angle. It is the exception to the routine
which makes the news story, and millions of readers are used to it.

The exceptional slant is also a legitimate fictional device, particu-
larly if the intended readers also read newspapers. But the journalistic
point of view in fiction has its hazards; fiction does not have the au-
thenticity of fact it cannot take consent for granted. Instead, it must
provide its own justification; the invention must convince. The more a
fiction exploits the unusual, therefore, the more patently it must justify
it. The more excessive the action, the more difficult this feat becomes.

The feat in journalistic fiction is to present an action with its ration-
alization already in the narrative but not immediately apparent. In
fact, it is characteristic of such fiction that it jumps off feat first. This,
of course, is the magazine technique. The slick writer's trick is to pre-
sent some apparently unsolvable conflict and then dissolve it through
the sudden emphasis on some latent factor which has been present all
along. He merely corrects a misunderstanding he has allowed to exist.
The happy ending of most magazine stories is built in to begin with.

Just Deserts 207

Whether the extravagance is a happy ending for a magazine or a vio-
lent sensation for a paperback, the sleight-of-hand is about the same,
and the greater the shock the greater the satisfaction. There are many
euphemisms for the technique of making an action acceptable. Maga-
zines refer to "editorial values," playwrights call them laws of dramatic
action, and professors of literature refer to conventions, but they are
still the tricks of the trade. The trick in writing paperback fiction is to
excite the reader with excess in such a way as to placate or elude his
judgment which would otherwise condemn it.

Paperback novels are aimed at particular kinds of retail outlets:
drugstores, newsstands and cigar-and-candy stores. With these outlets
it is natural that novels particularly original paperbacks should ex-
ploit the techniques of the newspapers and the magazines with which
they compete for attention. What is interesting is that technique in all
of these media is so much like the gimmick in the movies: the sudden
reversal which pays off every character in kind, The appeal of this fic-
tion is the moral posture which excuses itself without stooping to do so.

It is no coincidence that so many of James M. Cain's novels became
movies and appeared in paperback. Cain just happens to represent this
fiction whose declarative subject does not much matter and whose real
subject is violence. The eclectic war novel or business novel or med-
ical novel or hillbilly novel or whatever are merely more extreme ver-
sions. These denatured novels merely detour their narratives into one
sensation after another, with an expedient sham and the pretense of
being moral.

Sham and expedience arc considerably older than the novel, but
their authority has been increased in this particular form of writing by
two recent developments in American literary history. One develop-
ment, of course, concerns the new and various auspices of subsidiary
markets. The magazines, the films, and the paperbacks have all in-
creased the efficiency of rationalizing the reader's indulgence. But an-
other development, which is literary, has made this new efficiency pos-
sible. In fact, the change in the novel form since the end of the nine-
teenth century has become utterly congenial to the denaturing process.
It has made the novel more easily exploitable.

This major change in the form of the English novel has occurred

208 The Denatured Novel

within the past hundred years, accelerating in the American novel dur-
ing the past thirty. It is the author's withdrawal from his own fiction:
abdicating from the position of the moral observer and leaving such
commentary to the characters. The novel has gradually changed from a
dramatically illustrated essay to a dramatic presentation of a limited
point of view.

The crucial stage of this large development is commonly credited to
Henry James, who learned to build a story around a character's attempt
to define his predicament. For James the process of the character's dis-
covery constituted the entire story. No sooner had James developed
the convention of refracting incidents through the mind of a single
character, however, than other novelists began to popularize it. There
were different ways to appropriate the limited point of view, but the
great popularizing movement was actually a retreat from James's sub-
ject of the mind itself.

Reading James's novels is hard work; but the fiction of Edith Whar-
ton, Anne Sedgwick and Ellen Glasgow simplified the involvements
and the emotions by describing them. These writers had learned a les-
son from the master, and more people were able to read (and buy)
what they wrote. This particular stylization, however, of substituting
description for the dramatic illusion, has continued to the point of
utter boredom. Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (1955) is a
fair sample of the extremity.

But other American writers developed the dramatic point of view in
other ways. James had argued, in his famous essay on "The Art of Fic-
tion/' that art is a personal, direct impression of life. Impressionism
was already a fact when James wrote this, and the development of
impressions instead of commentary was another way of removing the
author from the scene. After awhile the overseer of the fictional world
was no longer even a character. This is the narrative fashion which so
much popular fiction has caricatured during the last thirty years,
clearly under the influence of Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was a style-maker long before he won the Nobel Prize in
1954, before the Swedish Academy cited him "for his powerful style-
forming mastery of the art of modern narration." He has said that
"style" is the way you got something done; it is the simplest and there-

Just Deserts 209

fore the best way of doing it. His fiction demonstrates it. Hemingway's
stories are apparently irreducible. The narratives are simple and ex-
plicit, but so understated that their signficance is always a matter of
implication.

The characters rarely testify about the encounter which makes a
story, and the events themselves stop short of resolving it. Heming-
way's short stories usually end just at the point where the conflict be-
comes explicit, or where the character realizes the conflict. The im-
portance of this moment in the life of a character had been the partic-
ular interest of Sherwood Anderson, from whom Hemingway absorbed
a great deal.

Anderson's interest was introspective; he attempted to show some
past crisis in the character's life which would account for his present
nature. He built his story according to what he called the "history of
moments." This critical "moment" is also the subject of most of Hem-
ingway's short stories, but with a difference. For Hemingway the story
is the process of making this moment finally explicit.

Indirection and understatement mark Hemingway's fiction; they
emphasize the irony which is usually his subject. These devices are also
what the stylizations of Hemingway exploit and exaggerate, and the
result is usually empty and pretentious. The cohering principle of
Hemingway's stories is the realization of the way things are. The end is
implicit in the beginning; it merely and finally becomes explicit. There
is no other resolution. But caricature can destroy this principle.

Hemingway explained his purpose and its hazards in his autobio-
graphical essay, Death in the Afternoon (1932). This primer on bull-
fighting is also an essay on style. Hemingway began by saying that he
"wanted to put down what really happened in action; what the actual
things were which produced the emotion that you experienced." He
wanted to show the "how" of things so exactly that the "why" would
be apparent. "The real thing," he said, was "the sequence of motion
and fact which made the emotion," and which with luck would en-
dure. In this "sequence of motion and fact" his stories cohere.

The sequence omits emotion, By stressing the physical sensations
which accompany emotion, however, Hemingway renders the moment
of crisis by impressions of inconsequential things. When Frederic

2 1 o The Denatured Novel

Henry leaves the hospital, in A Fare-well to Arms, his child dead and
his lover dying, his mind records the precise facts about a plate of ham
and eggs. In The Sun Also Rises, when Lady Brett discusses her gen-
erosity toward another man with Jake, the sexual cripple she would
rather have had, Jake orders a martini. The man dying of blood poison-
ing in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" tries to appraise the fatal turn of his
misspent life, and he recalls the details of the picture he was trying to
take with his camera when he fatally scratched himself.

By this process the dying man finally gets the picture of his life,
which is what Hemingway's fiction is all about. A few characters get
the picture with distorted clarity; and others never get it at all. Nothing
is resolved, but the clarity of "the actual things . . . which produced the
emotion that you experienced" gradually emerges. It emerges by in-
congruity: by the omission of what you might expect to find.

In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway wrote "The dignity of the
movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above
water." To define the submerged mass he plots what he can see. He is
like the painter who sees the "negative" space around the object it con-
figures. As the chasm dramatizes the cliff, the silence completes the
experience. "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writ-
ing ... he may omit things that he knows," Hemingway declares; "and
the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of
those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

But this is where stylization fails to convince. Hemingway himself
anticipated it: "A writer who omits things because he does not know
them only makes hollow places in his writing." Whether there are
"hollow places" or pregnant ones, in this style of indirection, depends
on whether sensations exist for their own sake or to serve the narrative.
Exaggerating the ironic understatement or incongruous omission de-
natures the novel form, because it leaves no overseer in the fictional
world: no presence to preside, no scheme or pattern to explain itself.

Sensation for its own sake can destroy the indirection of fiction. In
the extreme it even denies the complex nature of human experience,
as the narratives of Paul Bowles illustrate. Bowles describes predica-
ments which arise out of nowhere and lead violently to nothing. The
Sheltering Sky (1949) is about a white woman in the Sahara desert

Just Deserts 211

who is raped to the point of insanity. Let It Come Down (1952) is
about an American who hammers a nail into the ear of his Arab vic-
tim for no apparent reason. That is all there is to these narratives.

"The Distant Episode," a short story in The Delicate Prey (1950),
weighs just as much as any one of Bowles's novels and fairly summa-
rizes all of his fiction. In this story a nameless professor is attacked by
Arabs who cut out his tongue, throw him into a saddle bag, and keep
him as a pet; they dress him in tin plates and teach him obscene
dances. After a year or so they sell him, and at this point the professor
recovers sufficiently from his stupor to break away and run out into the
desert by himself. There is nothing else.

This is the end of the line. Experience becomes merely inexplicable
sensation. Paul Bowles's mindlessness is not worth considering, except
that it shows the absolute vacuum which an author's exit from his fic-
tion can accomplish. Into this sort of vacuum, in the absence of any
cohering scheme, some slick variation of tit for tat can be made to pass
for moral judgment. This is where journalism becomes relevant to the
novel, along with commercially sponsored sham and expedience.

Publishers add the pretense of morality to fiction that is already
mindless. When they piously say they must give the people what they
want, they mean that people want sensation for its own sake, along
with some face-saving device for indulging in it. As both an editor and
an advertiser, therefore, the publisher who makes the pious disclaimer
usually encourages the point of view which justifies one sensation by
another.

The reprinter's advertising of Erskine Caldwell's mindless fiction is
one example of this; so is the advertising of James M. Cain's. The dif-
ference between these two writers is that Cain himself exploits the
moral pretense; he has misused" the sort of narrative indirection which
Hemingway developed. But even Cain is modest compared to the lum-
bering distortions of John O'Hara.

O'Hara is a self-conscious legatee of Hemingway's "style-forming
mastery of the art of modern narration." He has eulogized Hemingway
as "the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived
since 1616"; and he has acknowledged his own indebtedness to Hem-
ingway. His short stories, like Hemingway's, advance to an explicit dis-

212 The Denatured Novel

closure of the conflict and then stop. But they are more obvious and
more insistently ironic than Hemingway's, and more limited in sub-
ject. They usually clarify the inept rationalization of a weak, unpleas-
ant character; and they manage a precise twist at the end, in the man-
ner of the short short story. O'Hara excels in this form. He is so adept,
in fact, that he conforms all his novels to it.

John O'Hara writes the longest short short stories in the literature.
His first and best book, Appointment in Samana, is usually praised for
its brevity and efficiency. The book dramatizes the events which pre-
cede a suicide. It is a terrifying story, no doubt of it; but mostly be-
cause it never explains itself. It lacks that novelistic quality of apprais-
ing as it represents its subject.

Appointment in Samana chronicles events during the last three
days in the life of a suburban businessman: his social trespasses which
embarrass or insult his peers, and which presumably cause him to kill
himself. Each trespass is credible, but the author's problem is to make
them seem like a chain of events. In this he fails, for they do not reveal
why the hero did what he did. Instead, the book offers the expedient
reciprocity: the churl gets his just deserts, and the ending says, "I told
you so."

A short story and a novel satisfy differently. A single incident can
end convincingly in one of many ways; but when a series of incidents
substantially repeat one another, as in a novel, each is bound to help
explain the rest, and the number of convincing resolutions decreases.
The simple shrug of irony will not do for a novel. This hero kills him-
self after his self-esteem has suddenly caved in. His trespasses are symp-
toms of this fact, but why or how they are connected with his appalling
inability to stay alive the author ignores.

O'Hara even obscures the question with a series of flashbacks which
have no relevance to events in the present. For example, the hero's
grandfather embezzled a lot of money and then blew his head all over
the hayloft; but neither embezzlement nor suicide is hereditary. As
a boy the hero had once stolen a flashlight from a store ,and been
caught; but this scarcely justifies his suicide over money matters. The
hero's faithful wife once had some unpleasant sexular adventures be-
fore she met the hero, but they are obviously irrelvant to his problem.

Just Deserts 213

None of these alarums and excursions show cause; but they do inter-
rupt the narrative and confuse the sequence of "fatal" events enough
to obscure its illogic. For this reason the story succeeds as well as it
does.

O'Hara keeps telling the same story that E. A. Robinson superbly
told, of "Richard Cory" who put a bullet through his head for no
known reason. O'Hara adds nothing but words. His most celebrated
novel, Ten North Frederick (1955), tells of another suicide, with two
important changes: it is longer and more pretentious than his first
novel. It tells about a well-born, capable citizen who drinks himself to
death. All the circumstances of this character's erosion are explicit, yet
the novel invalidates all of the lengthy reasons that might have
caused it.

The hero's wife despises him after realizing she cannot ever own
him; but the hero is scarcely aware of this. He loses two million dollars
in the stock market; but he has one million dollars left. He sustains a
broken leg and a concussion; but they heal in plenty of time for him to
begin drinking himself to death. Much is made of his frustrated polit-
ical ambitions; but he shows every resolve to regain his self-confidence,
and says as much.

The book minimizes the only uncontradicted reason why this hero
might prefer cirrhosis of the liver. He despatches his daughter's mar-
riage by annulment and abortion. He does so in the space of three
sentences: about seventy words of the novel's 140,000. Despite the
novel's exhaustive testimony about his love for his daughter and his
sense of responsibility in general, there is not a word about the soul-
agony this experience might have caused him. In one sentence, fifty
pages after the event, the hero tells his lover (his daughter's room-
mate) that he thinks he might not have done the right thing. This is
the sort of "hollow place" Hemingway warned about. In O'Hara's case
it is a vast emptiness which completely begs the character.

O'Hara's other major efforts are equally pretentious. A Rage to Live
(1949) amplifies the sexual instinct in its heroine. The first half of this
inordinately long book sounds like a mating manual, as it trains the
heroine for marriage, and the second half demonstrates the uncon-
vincing foolishness of this assertedly shrewd woman. In tedious detail

214 The Denatured Novel

it describes her just deserts and how she earns them, but why she earns
them is no concern of O'Hara's. His latest book, From the Terrace
(1958), is even more fulsome and more evasive. It is a complete sta-
tistical record of irrelevant details in the life of an investment banker
and his community. This pompous exhibition even includes footnotes,
yet it completely shuns the responsibility of making a believable fic-
tion.

O'Hara's endless narratives are monuments to moral pretense. They
fake the novel's complexity with the simplism of total recall. All fic-
tion distorts, and a novel's genuine complexity can make distortion
into a commentary on more than itself. But a novel's only justification
is its relevance to actuality; if it is not believable in this sense, it is
worthless. The trouble with most denatured novels like O'Hara's is
that they are unbelievable, so whatever pretense they make is gross.

The ideal of a mindless pretense to morality is what the marketese
of the book trade tries to create. Because fiction has always been con-
sidered a luxury in this nation, it has nearly always been sold in a
buyer's market and disguised as a useful instrument. The economic
history of the trade since the 1 890*5, and particularly since the 1930'$,
has merely aggravated the difference between what seems and what is.

The distinguishing fact about most of our national fiction is that it
is published for non-readers. This nation now has more literate citizens
who do not read than any nation in tne world. All publishers Know
this, which is why most of them are afraid to take a chance. The best
way to stay solvent is to satisfy the customer. But the customer is rarely
a reader; he is merely a consumer.

In every retail industry the consumer is king. He is the "average
man" who is sought after and gratified. This is relevant to the eco-
nomic organization of the book trade. The major changes in the pub-
lishing industry since the end of the nineteenth century have all been
changes in marketing methods, and they reflect the demise of the
entrepreneur. The publisher is no longer in control. Much of his edi-
torial function has been appropriated by the so-called "subsidiary"
distributors of fiction via magazines, films, book clubs and cheap re-
prints; and these distributors are committed to the mythical "average
man."

Just Deserts 215

Book publishing always has been inefficient; the trade publisher has
never really been in touch with the readers who buy novels. The book
industry knows no such thing as that ideal of total communication
which market researchers lovingly idealize; in their jargon the pub-
lisher has no efficient "feedback" from book buyers. This is so because
his real customers are not book buyers but marketers.

When the bookstores return his "best sellers 7 ' by the carload, the
publisher looks around for some signals. He gets them from the adver-
tising of the book club which has turned down his last twenty books;
from the reprinter who in turn responds to the magazine wholesaler;
from the movie studio which takes its orders from film distributors and
theater owners. In short, the trade publisher gets his signals from mer-
chandisers and from the owners of entertainment properties who use
fiction as a by-product.

At this point the old antithesis between art and entertainment dis-
solves into a synthesis called manufacture. From his marketers, the
publisher derives an image of the tired housewife or the traveling busi-
nessman or the stenographer waiting for her home permanent to set:
consumers, who will pay to be gratified by fiction. Then, if the artifact
happens to please, the publisher will search for others which reproduce
it without seeming to. He manufactures reproductions. He also ration-
alizes in public that he cannot give people any "better" than they
want. But this is specious. The publisher does not know about the con-
sumers of the subsidiary products any more than he might know about
his readers.

Although the publisher has become a frightened man, he still has a
few vestiges of editorial authority. At least he has not yet reached the
absurd predicament of the automobile manufacturer who lets his pub-
lic relations staff design his products. The publisher has not yet choked
on his own "feedback" because the trade is so badly organized (blessed
are the disorganized). It has never been so centralized as the automo-
bile industry or any other industry in the national economy. The dif-
fusion of influence in the book trade has obstructed communications
and delayed the tyranny of the consumer.

In the present confusion the trade publisher still has a chance. At
least he is the only one who can do anything about it. Now, as ever,

2 1 6 The Denatured Novel

his individual decision of whether to publish a given book or how to
publish it, many times repeated, defines the quality of the literature.
Literature may be no concern of the publisher, but it is his business. It
so happens that the individuality of a book serves both literature and
business. If the publisher can convince his marketers that the peculiar
difference of every book is its most salable quality, there might yet be a
revolution in the book trade which would give the reader his just
deserts.

Index

Able Company, 180-181, 196

Able One Four, 180, 196-197, 201

Across the River and into the Trees, 142

Act of Love, An, 179

Adamson, Hans C, 138

Alice Adams, 103-104

All Quiet on the Western Front, 180

All the King's Men, 146

Ambassadors, The, 40

American, The, 40

American Magazine, 83-84

American Mercury, 28

American Publishers Association, 15

American Spectator Yearbook, 109

American Tragedy, An, 123-125

Anderson, Sherwood, 85, 209

Anthony Adverse, 159

Ape s, Angels, and Victorians; The Story
of Darwin, Huxley and Evolution, 158

Apley, George, 173

Appleton, D., Co., 27

Appointment in Samarra, 145, 212

Architects of Fate, 26

"Are Novels Worth Reading?" 27-28

"Are the American Novelists Deteriorat-
ing?" 27

Armat, Thomas, iio-m

Arminian Heresy, 170

Armory Show of 1913, 45

Armstrong, Henry, 158

Arrowsmith, 96

Arrowsmith, Martin, 98

"Art of Fiction, The," 208

Arthur, Timothy Shay, 19

Arthur Mervyn, 19

"Artificial Selection," 84

Asch, Scholem, 43

Ashbaugh, George, 158

Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa, an Amer-
ican Tale Founded on Fact, The, 17

Atherton, Gertrude, 85, 108

Atkinson, Donald T., 158

Atlantic, 161

Away All Boats, 181, 185, 187, 196

Babbitt, 96-97
Babbitt, Irving, 144
Bacheiler, Irving, 108
Baggott, King, 112

Bailey, Temple, 85, 88, 100

Baldwin, Faith, 85-86

Balla, 45

Bamboo, 181-182, 200

Banning, Margaret Culkin, 86, 88, 89

Bantam Books, 133, 140, 162

Bara, Theda, 114

Barlowe, Shep, 152

Barrymore, John, 112

Barwick, Cleves, 167-168, 174-175

Barzun, Jacques, 73

Battle Cry, 181, 185-186, 196

"Bazaar Spirit," 27

Beach, Rex, 108

Beachhead in Hell,

see Red Beach Assault
Beer, Thomas, 89
Behn, Aphra, 29
Bellamy, Edward, 18
Benet, Stephen Vincent, 91, 94
Ben-Hur, 107-108
Bennett, Arnold, 85
Berle, Adolphe A., 166
"Best Selling Consensus," 16
Better Homes and Gardens, 84
Between Heaven and Hell, see Day the

Century Ended, The
Bibbs, 1 01
Bible, 25

Big Fisherman, The, 43, 47
Big War, The, 190-191
Birth of a Nation, 121
Bishop, John Peale, 92
Blakesley, Roger, 162-163
Blondes, Brunettes, and Bullets, 158
Bluestone, George, 117
Bolton, Mrs. Sarah Knowles, 26
Book Find Club, 178
Book-of-the-Month Club, 77-78, 91, 140,

162, 178-179
"Book Publishing: The Insular Industry,

48
Book Supplement of the New York

Times, 15
"Book, the Buyer and the Critic, The,"

7i. 157

Bookman, 15, 31
Borzoi Quarterly, The, 159
Bowen, Robert, 181, 200

2 1 8 The Denatured Novel

Bowker Lectures, 20, 48, 86, 89

Bowles, Paul, 210-211

Brandt, Carl, 91

Breaking into the Movies, 119

"Break-Up of the Novel, The," 27

Brett, Lady, 210

Bridget's Food of Life, 52

Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, 13

Brill, Martin, 175

Bronte, Charlotte, 23

Brown, Charles Brockden, 17, 19, 30

Brown, Harry, 180

Brush, Katherine, 88

Buck, Pearl, 85

Bullard, Avery, 170

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earl, ist
Baron Lytton, 16, 23

Burnham, James, 166

Burns, John Home, 180

Burton, Tony, 162-163

Butterfly, The, 127, 130-131, 157

Cabell, James Branch, 88

Cain, James M., 126-132, 157, 207, 211

Came Mutiny, The, 179, 181, 186, 198-

200, 203-204
Caldwell, Erskine, 136-137, 143, 148-

154, 211

Caldwell, Taylor, 85
Call It Experience, 150
Calmer, Ned, 189
Calvinism, 24-25
Carnegie, Dale, 26
Carter, Ross, 181
Cary, Lucian, 89

CashMcCall, 167-170, 172, 174, 176, 205
Castle, Everett Rhodes, 89
Catalogue of All the Books Printed in the

United States, 14
Gather, Willa, 85, 88
Censored: the Private Life of the Movies,

116

Ceram, C W., 157
Chaplin, Charlie, 112
Charlotte Temple; A Tale of Truth, 17
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 151
Cheney, O. H., 49, 71-12, 79, 105, 144,

157

Chicago Board of Trade Building, 176
Chillingworth, 36-37
Churchill, Winston, 178
Cinderella, 34-36, 42, 91, 102

Country Home, 83

Country Lawyer, 63

Covenant Theology, 25

Covered Wagon, The, 88

Crack-Up, The, 91

Cram, Mildred, 109

Crane, Stephen, 88, 122

Crater, The, 18

Crisis of the Film, The, 114

Crockett, Chism, 153

Crofts, Frederick, 20, 23

Crowell, T. Irving, 25

Crowell, Thomas Young, 25-26

Crowell Corporation, 83

Crusade in Europe, 178

Cubism, 45

Cummins, Maria, 23

Current Literature, 27

Curtis Publishing Company, 83-84, 140

Dale, Edgar, 114

Darwin, Charles, 122

David Harum, 63

Davis, Elmer, 86, 89, 104

Davis, Richard Harding, 108

Day the Century Ended, The, 189, 205

Death in the Afternoon, 209-210

Cinderella, 107, 120

Civil War, 160

Clark, Gil, 168-169, 174

Clark, Walter Van Tiiburg, 145

Cleavage Press, 58, 65

Coates, Robert M., 147

Cobb, Irvin S., 88

Cohen, Octavus Roy, 89

Coleman, Lonnie, 181

Colliers, 83, 85, 96

Company K, 183

Complete Home Treasury of Successful

Planning for Health and Happiness in

Your Life, The, 52-53
Compulsion, 142

Conquest of Canaan, The, 101-102
Conrad, Joseph, 85, 181
Content of Motion Pictures, The, 114
Cooper, James Fenimore, 16, 18, 21, 30, 47
Copyright Act, 13-14, 16, 82, 136
Coquette; A Novel Founded on Fact.

The, 17

Cosmopolitan, 84
Costain, Thomas, 43
Country Doctor, 63
Country Gentleman, 83

Index

219

Deep Six, The, 198-200

Defoe, Daniel, 29

De Givry, Grillot, 158

DeGraff, Robert, 135

Deland, Margaret, 85

Delicate Prey, The, 211

Dell, publishers, 133, 140

DeMare, George, 167, 174, 205

"Devil and Daniel Webster, The," 91

DeVoto, Bernard, 85, 89

Dibner, Martin, 198-200

Dickens, Charles, 16, 23

Dimmesdale, The Reverend, 36-38

"Distant Episode, The," 211

Dodson, Kenneth, 181, 185-187

Dodsworth, 40, 42-43, 47, 96-97

Dodsworth, Sam, 41, 97

"Does the Present-Day Fiction Make for

Immortality?" 27
"Dog on a Leash," 45
Dollar Book Club, 77, 179
Dooley, Mr., 83

Dos Passos, John, 184, 192-193, 196
"Double Indemnity," 129-130
Douglas, Lloyd, 43
Down-Easters, The, 20
Dreiser, Theodore, 30, 88, 122-124, 134,

1 60

Duchamp, Marcel, 45
Dunne, Finley Peter, 83
Durable Fire, The, 168

Ecclesiastes, Book of, 187

Economic Control of the Motion Picture

Industry, in
Economic Survey of the Book Industry,

49, 71-72, 79, 105, 157
"Economics of Authorship, The," 86
Edgeworth, Maria, 21
Edison, Thomas, no
Edmonds, Walter D., 89
Eggleston, Edward, 19
Eisenhower, Dwight, 178
Eisenstein, 193
"Embezzlers," 129
Emerson, John, 119
Eminent Authors Pictures Incorporated,

108-109
Empire and Martin Brill, The, 167,

174-177, 205

End of the World, The, 19
Enemy, The, 181, 187-188, 196
Episode in Palmetto, 149

Ernst, Morris, 116

Ewald, William B., 158

Executive Suite t 167, 170-172, 174, 177

Fabliaux, 151

Famous American Authors, 26

Famous American Statesmen, 26

Famous Men of Science, 26

Famous Players Company, 113

Farewell to Arms, A, 62, 109, 143, 180-

181, 210

Farm and Fireside, 83
Farrell, James T., 30
"Fate of the Novel, The," 27
Faulkner, William, 88-89, I2 5, *34, l8
Fawcett Publications, 140
Ferber, Edna, 85, 88
Fiction Book Club, 179
Fielding, Henry, 29, 151
First National Survey of Best Selling

Books, 15

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 85
Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 112
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 30, 91-92, 94
Ford, Corey, 89
Forester, C. S., 187, 197, 198
Foster, Hannah, 17
Fletcher, John Gould, 114
Franklin, Benjamin, 16, 25, 170
Franklin Book Club, 58
Franklin Library of Practical Living, 51-

52, 65

Frederic, Harold, 31
Free Air, 96
Free French Forces, 125
French Underground, 125
Freud, Sigmund, 122
From Here to Eternity, 122, 179, 181-

182, 196, 198, 200
From Main Street to Stockholm, 95
From the Terrace, 214
Futurism, 45

Galatea, 129

Gale, Zona, 88

Gallery, The, 62, 180

Galsworthy, John, 85

Gardner, Erie Stanley, 134

Garland, Hamlin, 30

Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth (Cleghorn

Stevenson), 23
Gathering Storm, The, 178
Gaynor, Lewis, 48-50, 53-57, 60, 62-63,

67-68, 70-80

izo The Denatured Novel

Gentleman from Indiana, The, 101

Georgia Boy, 143

"Girl Before a Mirror," 45

Glamour, 84

Glasgow, Ellen, 85, 88, 208

Glory, God, and Gold, 158

Gloves, Glory, and God, 158

God, Gold, and Government, 138

God, Sex and Youth, 158

Gods, Graves, and Scholars, 157-158

Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient

Greece, 158

God's Little Acre, 136-137, 143, 149, 154
Gods, Sex, and Saints, 158
Goldberg, Rube, 44
Golden Multitudes, 22
Gold Medal Books, 133, 140
Goldwyn, Samuel, 108
Gone with the Wind, 32, 37-40, 47, 54,

159

Good Housekeeping, 84
Good Shepherd, The, 187, 197
"Grains of Sands," 88
Granlund, Nils T., 158
Gray, Charles, 63, 148, 162-164, 166,

168, 170, 172-173
Great Gat shy, The, 92
Greatest Trust in the World, The, 160
Greenwald, 203
Grey, Zane, 108
Griffith, D. W., 107, 121
Griselda, 154

Grosset & Dunlap, 140, 162
"Guardsman, The," 109
Guest of Quesnay, The, 103
Gulf Coast Stories, 149
Gurko, Leo, 158
Gwaltney, Francis Irby, 189-190, 205

Hackett, James K., 113

Hale, Edward Everett, 24

Harcourt, Alfred, 95-96, 98

Harcourt, Brace, 95

Harland, Marion, 23

Harlow, Jean, 114

Harper's Bazaar, 84

Harper's Magazine, 28, 95, 101

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 82

Hart, James, 23

Hawkes, Captain, 186

Hawley, Cameron, 167-170, 172, 174,

176-177, 205
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 18, 23, 30, 37-39

Hayes Office, 116

Hearst's International, 84

Hemingway, Ernest, 32, 123, 125, 142-

143, 180-181, 188, 208-213
Henry, Frederic, 209-210
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 89
Heroes, Highbrows and the Popular

Mind, 158

Heroes, Kings, and Men, 158
Herrick, Robert, 160
History of American Magazines, 82
Hollands, J. D., 180-181, 196
Hollywood, 63, 106, 109, 112, 117, 132,

177, 179-180

Hollywood: The Dream Factory, 116
Holmes, Mary J., 23
Home-and-Jesus Formula, 22
Hough, Emerson, 88
House and Garden, 84
House Beautiful, 84
House of the Seven Gables, 18
Howells, William Dean, 30, 81-82, 164-

166

Huckleberry Finn, 143
Huettig, Mae D., in
Hughes, Rupert, 108
Hulme, William E., 158
Hurst, Fannie, 88
Hynd, Alan, 158

Ide, Hatcher, 101
/ Wanted to Write, 92
// Christ Came to Chicago, 24
// Jesus Came to Boston, 24
Image of Josephine, 103
In His Steps, 24-25, 51
Independent, 27
Irvine, William, 158
"Is Present-Day Fiction Quite Ephe-
meral?" 27

"Is the Novel Being Superseded?" 27
"Is the Novel Done For?" 28

Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, 101

Jackpot, 150-151

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 108

Jacob, 165

Jake, 210

James, G.P.R., 21-22, 102

James, Henry, 19, 40, 62, 90, 208

Jane Eyre-Rochester Relation, 23

Jessica, 148

Jesus, 24-25, 43-44

Index 221

Job, Book of, 187

John Brown's Body, 91

Jones, James, 122, 179, 181-182, 192,

195-196, 198, 200
Journeyman, 151
Judas Iscariot, 43
Jungle, The, 160

Kahn, Lawrence, 180, 196-197, 201

KaJem Studio, 107

Kantaylis, Danny, 190

Kate Fennigate, 102

Kearney, Patrick, 123

Keefer, Lieutenant, 203

Kennedy, John Pendleton, 21

Kennicott, Carol, 97

Kerr, Sophie, 89

Kershner, Howard E., 158

Key West, 124

King, Basil, 108

Knopf, Alfred, 157, 159, 162

Korean Conflict, 180

Koster and Bial's Music Hall, no

Kyne, Peter B., 88

Ladies' Home Journal, 27, 83-84, 162
Laemmle, Carl, 112
La Farge, Oliver, 89
Lamplighter, 23
Lapham, Silas, 164-166
Lardner, Ring, 88
Lasky, Jesse, 86
Last Supper, 44
Late George Apley, The, 92-93
Lawrence, Florence, 112
Lea, Fanny Heaslip, 88
Leather Stocking Tales, 30, 107
Legion of Decency, 115
Lester, Jeeter, 143
Let It Come Down, 211
Levin, Meyer, 142

Lewis, Sinclair, 31, 40-42, 85, 95-98
Leypoldt, Frederick, 73
Life of an American Fireman, 120
Lippincott's Magazine, 27
Literary Guild, 77, 100, 704, 179
Little, Brown, 26-27
Lively Lady, The, 92

Lives of Girls Who Became Famous, 26
Living Age, 27
Lockwood, Charles A., 158
Loesser, Thomas, 53, 55-56, 58-59, 61-
62, 64, 67-70, 74

Logan, A Family History, 19

Lombard, Carole, 114

London, Jack, 88, 90-91, 108, 122, 132

Look Homeward, Angel, 62

Looking Backward, 18

Loos, Anita, 119, 125

Lorentz, Pare, 116

Lorenzo Bunch, The, 100

Lorimer, George Horace, 87-89, 96, 98

Louden, Joe, 101

Love's Lovely Counterfeit, 130

Ludwig, Emil, 85

Macaulay, Richard, 89

MacDonald, John, 205

Macy, R. H., 15

Madame Bo vary, 40

Mademoiselle, 84

Madison Avenue, 177

Magazine Revolution, 82

Magic, Myth, and Medicine, 158

Mailer, Norman, 178-180, 194-196, 198

Main Street, 95-98

Majdalany, Fred, 188-189

Managerial Revolution, The, 166

Man from Main Street, 95

Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 167, 171

Man of Affairs, 205

"Man of Letters as a Man of Business," Si

Mantrap, 96-97

Mar hie Faun, The, 18

March, William, 180, 183-184

Marden, Dr. Orison, 26

Marek, Kurt W., 157

Marjorie Morningstar. 40, 208

Marquand, John P., 30, 89, 92-93, 134,

147-148, 156, 159, 161-168, 171-174,

176, 182, 205
Martin Eden, 90-91, 94
Matthews, Brander, 53
Maxwell-Essex Fund, 80
McCall's, 84-85, 100
McClure's Magazine, 160
Mclntosh, Marion, 23
Means, Gardiner C, 166
Melies, Georges, 107, 120
Melville, Herman, 30, 134
Metalious, Grace, 106
Midlander, The, 101
Miller, The Reverend Samuel, 13-14
Mirthful Haven, 103
Miss Lonely hearts, 147
Mister Roberts, 181

222

The Denatured Novel

Mitchell, Isaac, 17

Mitchell, Margaret, 37

Modern Corporation and Private Pro-
perty, The, 1 66

Moll Flanders, 40

Money Writes! 84, 86

Monsieur Beaucaire, 101

Monster Books, 58, 64, 68

Morgan, Harry, 124-125

Morgan, J. P., 160

Morina, 129

Morris, Gouverneur, 108

Moth, The, 131

Motion Picture Academy Awards, 118

Motion Picture Patents Company, no-
112, 115

Motion Picture Production Code, 116

Motion Picture Research Council, 113-114

Mott, Frank Luther, 22, 82

Moving Picture World, 132

Munsey, Frank, 94

Murder, Mayhem and Mystery, 158

"My Old Man," 143

Myrer, Anton, 190

Nahum, Book of, 194-195

Naked and the Dead, The, 58, 62, 178-

181, 192-196, 198
Nation, 28

National Book Award, 50
National Usury Association, 63
Nazarene, The, 43-44
Neal, John, 16, 19-20, 30, 143
Newcombe, Alan, 190-191
New England Novels, 93
New Leader, The, 73
Newman, Christopher, 40
New Testament, 43
New York Herald Tribune, 63
New York Times, 15, 63
Night Before Dying, The, see Wisteria

Cottage

Nobel Prize, 42, 50, 95, 208
Norris, Frank, 30, 88, 122, 134, 160, 176
Norris, Kathleen, 85
North American Review, 21, 27
North of Grand Central, 93
Notions of the Americans, 16
Novels into Film, 117
"Nude Descending a Staircase," 45

O'Hara, John, 142, 145, 211-214
O'Hara, Scarlett, 37-38, 42

Peoples' Book Club, 179

Perkins, Professor Horatio, 150

Perkins, Maxwell, 61-62

Peter Rabbit, 181

Peyton Place, 106

Phillips, David Graham, 88

Picasso, Pablo, 45

Pickford, 112, 114

Pictorial Review, 84-85

Pierre, 30

Pike, Judge Martin, 101

Pit, The, 176

Plain Man's Pathway to Health, The, 52

Plutocrat, The, 40, 42-43, 47

Pocket Books, 133, 135

Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 21, 143

Point of No Return, 63, 147, 161-164,

166-170, 172-173, 176, 205
Polk, Horace, 52-54, 70
Polk, Horace, Jr., 68
Polk & Franklin, 48-80
Pollyanna, 108, 114
"Poor Boys Who Became Famous," 26
Poor Richard's Almanac, 25, 52
Popular Book, The, 23
Popular Library, 133, 140
Porter, Edwin S., 120-121
Porter, Eleanor, 108
Porter, Gene Stratton, 31
Olcott, Sidney, 107
Old Testament, 131, 194
Oliphant, Dan, 101
Omnibook, 179

One Hundred Years of Publishing, 26
O'Neill, Eugene, 33, 181
O'Neill, Jay, 191
Oppenheimer, E. Phillips, 89
Origin of the Species, 181
Orphism, 45
Ox-Bow Incident, 145-146

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, 16, 25, 40,

H5

Pandora, 127, 130
Paramount Studios, 86, HI, 123
Parsifal, 101

"Passing of the Novel, The," 27
Past All Dishonor, 127-128
Patrol, 1 88
Paul, Louis, 158
Paulding, James K., 18, 21
Peale, The Reverend Norman Vincent, 26
Pease, Irvie, 101

Index 223

Post Hall Syndicate, 179

Postman Always Rings Twice, The, 126-

127, 129

Powdermaker, Hortense, 116-117
Power and the Prize, The, 167, 172, 175-

176

Presenting Lily Mars, 103
Prewitt, Private, 195-196
Prynne, Hester, 35-39, 42
Publishers' Weekly, 15-16, 27, 60, 63,

70, 73, 79, i6, 178
Pulham, H. M., 173
Pulitzer Prize, 50
Pushing to the Front, or Success Under

Difficulties, 26
Putnam, George Palmer, 23

Queeg, Captain, 186, 198-200, 203
Quigley, Executive Officer, 186
Quo Vadis? 27

Radcliffe, Anne (Ward), 21

Radio Corporation of America, in

Radio-Keith-Orpheum, in

Rage to Live, A, 213

Ramona, 108

Randolph >e, 16

Rath, Tom, 171-172

Reader's Digest, 137

Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club,

78, 179

Readers Guide, 27
"Readers or Buyers," 71
Red Badge of Courage, The, 62
Red Beach Assault, 58-59, 62-64, 66, 74
"Red Dust," 109
Redbook, 84
Remarque, Eric, 180-181
Return to Peyton Place, 106
"Richard Cory," 213
Richardson, Samuel, 16, 29, 115
Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 85, 88-89, lo8
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 164
Robert Elsmere, 24, 158-159
Roberts, Kenneth, 89, 92, 104
Robinson, E. A., 213
Rockwell, Norman, 44
Rogues, Royalty, and Reporters, 158
Rouse, W. H. D., 158
Rowson, Susanna, 17
Russell, Charles Edward, 160

Salvation Army, 24

Sandberg, Carl, 85

Saturday Evening Post, 44, 83-84, 87-89,

91, 95-96, 98
Saturday Review, 85, 118
Scarlet Letter, The, 30, 35-40, 47, 107
Schulberg, Budd, 118-119
Scott, Sir Walter, 16, 21-22
Scribner's Magazine, 81
Sea-Wolf, The, 132
Secret Achievement, The, 26
Sedgwick, Anne, 208
Serenade, 130
Seventeen, 84
Shapiro, Lionel, 181
Shaw, Irwin, 179-180, 192-196, 198
Shaw, Loren, 170-171
Sheldon, Charles, 24, 51
Sheldon, Walt, 189, 204
Sheltering Sky, The, 210
Ship's Company, 181
Shore Leave, 143, 180
Sienkiewicz, Henry, 27
Silver Chalice, The, 43, 47
Simms, William Gilmore, 17, 21, 30
Simon Peter, 43
Sinclair, Upton, 84, 86, 160
Singular Life, A, 24
Sister Carrie, 40
Sixth of June, The, 181
"Slump in American Writing, The," 28
Smith, Harrison, 95
Smith, Joseph L., 157
Smollett, Tobias (George), 29, 151
"Snows of Kilimanjaro, The," 210
Soldier's Pay, 180
"Song of Solomon," 49, 79, 143
South Pacific, 181
Southern Literary Messenger, 21
Southworth, Mrs. E. D. E. N., 23
Spillane, Mickey, 31, 134
Standard Oil Corporation, 160
Stark, Willie, 146
Stead, William T., 24
Stephens, Ann, 23
Steps Toward Heaven, 19
Sternberg, Joseph Von, 123
Sterne, Laurence, 16
Strange Land, The, 189
Strether, Lambert, 40
Sun Also Rises f The, 143, 210
Sure Hand of God, The, 149, 151
Swedish Academy, 208
Swiggett, Howard, 167-168

224 The Denatured Novel

Tabor, Ariel, 101

Tank Destroyers, The, 180, 196-197, 201

Tarbell, Ida M., 160

Tarkington, Booth, 40-42, 85, 89, 92,

98-104, 1 08
Tasker, George, 56, 58
Tender Is the Night, 91
Ten North Frederick, 213
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 16
They Bank on Me, 58-59, 63-64
This Very Earth, 151, 153
Thomas Young Crowell, 25
Thompson, Daniel Pierce, 21
Thoreau, Henry, 143
Those Devils in Baggy Pants, 181
Three of a Kind, 129
Three Soldiers, 192-193, 196
Ticknor, William, 23
Tinker, Earl J., 41-42
Tin Pan Alley, 46
Tobacco Road, 143, 149
To Have and Have Not, 123-124
Tombs, Temples & Ancient Art, 157
Tragic Ground, 151
Trouble in July, 151-153
Troubling of a Star, 189, 204
Turmoil, 100-101
Turner, Lana, 126
Twain, Mark, 134, 143, 151
20th Century Fox, 106, in

Ulysses, 116

United States Census of Manufacturers, 70
University of Oklahoma Press, 157
Uris, Leon, x8i, 185

Vamp, 114-115
Van Doren, Carl, 95
Vanrcvel, Tom, 101
Vichy Government* i a$
Vistavision, 186 1.0.
Vitascope, iio-m
V-J Day, 178
Vogue, 84

Wakeman, Frederic, 143, 180
Walden, Ty Ty, 154
Walk in the Sun, A, 62, 180
Wallace, Lew, 107
Walling, Don, 170-171, i?4
Wall Street Journal, 63
Wanamaker, John, 15

War and Peace, 32, 181

Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 24

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 24

Warner Brothers, in

Warner, Susan, 23, 158

Warren, Robert Penn, 146

Waterfront, 118

Wellman, Paul, 158

West, Mae, 114-115

West, Nathanael, 147

West, Rebecca, 88

Western Electric, in

Western Printing and Lithography Com-
pany, 140

Westward Ho! 18

Wharton, Edith, 85, 88, 208

"What is Worth While" Series, 26

Whipple, E. P., 21-22, 102

"Why Write It When You Can't Sell It
to the Pictures?" 118

Wide, Wide World, The, 23, 158

Wi eland, 19

Wilder, Thornton, 31

"Will the Novel Disappear?" 27

Wilkins, Mary E., 85

Williams, Ben Ames, 89, 108

Williams, Tennessee, 142

Williams, Wirt, 181, 187

Wilson, Edmund, 91, 143

Wilson, Sloan, 167, 171-172, 174

Wisteria Cottage, 147

Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, 158

Wolfe, Thomas, 62, 134

Wolfert, Ira, 179-180

Woman's Home Companion, 83, 85

World War I, 166, 180, 183

World War II, 62-63, 65, 105, in, 135,
138, 1 66, 178, 180, 184

Worth and Loesser, 53

i, 1 86, 198-200,

[arold Bell, 24, 27, 31
\ook, The, 86

*#

Young Lions, The, 180, 192-196, 198

Zenith, U.S.A., 41

Zola, Emile, 165

Zoomies, Subs, and Zeros, 158

Zukor, Adolph, 112-113